Lots of television for somebody who doesn't watch television

The Simpsons and South Park are back, and this time they're funny. The Simpsons started off all crappy for the first two episodes of the season and then the third was great. And South Park spent all last year being lousy, to the point where I'd argue to watch something, anything else when the F-word got in a cartoon mood. But the two episodes that have came out most recently are just lovely, and thinking back I believe I wasn't even high whilst watching them.



It's hard to have any patience with situation comedies that aren't cartoons anymore. But 30 Rock is also back and also lovely. The season premiere gave a little sketch of a new class tension between Jack and Kenneth that I can't help but want them to exploit the hell out of over the season. But I'm guessing the odds are against the series creators having my sorts of Marxist agendas. Oh well, the dialogue is still sparkling.

From the bedroom to the marketplace

You know what I was saying the other day about Arcade Fire? Final Fantasy is also very sweet. And also very tinkly. It's like a Belle and Sebastian that can actually play their (his?) instruments properly. And any musical entity that calls its debut album He Poos Clouds is all win, even if I don't understand Dungeons and Dragons. I wonder if people still play that.

Anyways, look at this Owen Pallett, it's ridiculously awesome:

Take your tradition and shove it up your revolting dairy farmer

The natives are restless, to the degree their protests - oh, it's the one and only thing I love about the fucking Belges, they are walking surreal - have made it into Picture is Unrelated. I buy directly from the farmers at the market, and fail to understand why the entire city of Brussels doesn't do so. So I don't really care if the farmers feel like their wholesale prices suck. And frankly I'd be wallowing through a bit more tearjerks of fucking sympathy if I didn't remember the rabidity with which our vendor jacked up the farmer's market prices in 2007 when there was an upswing in wholesale prices. Didn't hear them fucking whining about a free market then.

But still, this is Europe and what do you expect. Farming is tradition, as is assaulting working class police officers who didn't cause and can't fix your fucking problems, and some of these families have done nothing else in all of recorded history, why should they stop now just because any value-subtracted, long-life dairy product like skim milk or butter is much, much cheaper and not worse if you source it from some poor country somewhere where farmers are too busy starving and killing themselves to spray milk on a cop?

My attitude to tradition is undergoing a bit of a walloping at the mo, by the way. I guess it's hearing all the North American outrage about those dumbass Australians who minstreled up the Jackson Five and got told by Harry Connick Jr. Everybody mentions it to me because everybody knows I intend to go there and everybody wants to know what I think about living in such a fucking racist country.

And my answer to that is that racism in honky Australia is one of the top three things making me nervous about living there. The way they treat Aborigines makes it look like honky Canada is giving the First Nations a fucking multi-generational spa-and-tonguebath treatment (and honky Canada really isn't giving them a spa-and-tonguebath treatment). I'm guessing already that as soon as I start shit-talking to anybody there about how cuntly that is, they'll dismiss my "ooo er so they don't have any fucking land rights" as Yankee political correctness, even though I'm not Yankee, and even though I'm pretty sure I'm not politically correct, and then I'll get mad, and I understand they're punchy sorts of people, and then, you know, it'll just be a bad scene.

But you know what happens to children at Christmas if they'd bad where I live now? Zwarte Peter (who by different accounts is either Sinterklaas's Moorish 'helper' who he liberated, or a black devil he enslaved) carries some willow switches down the fucking chimney to beat the kid up. And people black up to play him, on television, on the streets, at kid's parties, with big fucking red Meg Ryan lips and everything. It causes the absolute minimum of outrage and nobody uses Zwarte Peter to talk about how fucking racist Belgians and Dutch people are, even thought Belgians and Dutch people have a couple of the most august and recent histories of massive colonial exploitation and slave trading. It causes the minimum of outrage because it's fucking tradition.

So you know what I think living in a fucking racist country like Australia is going to be like? Like here but better. Fewer goddamn traditions. Cultural bankruptcy, I'm starting to think, may not be 100% bad.

A statement of the obvious

The Arcade Fire is fucking ace. That's so obvious I feel a little silly typing it out. But I've forgotten about it for awhile as it's a bit too tinkly for the F-word so it doesn't get played at home, and for the past year or so my work has been so wordy that I don't think I've listened to music at the office for ages. But now that it's getting a little more spatial I can listen to music in a serious way at the same time, and it's been so nice to have Funeral and Neon Bible playing away.

Aside from the charm of the music, which I do find charming on its own merits, the Arcade Fire gives me pleasure by making me imagine a world where mainstream soul and R&B and fucking everything didn't suffer from a massive and indiscrimate uptake of electronic musical effects. Obviously I love electronic musical effects, but something went wrong somewhere. We're not in a situation where everybody is still touring with horn sections and that lots of big bands are soaking up all of those wandering lost uni music grads. Nope. Just Arcade Fire, and Final Fantasy, and a bunch of other Canadian and European weirdos who I never hear of until it's far too late - case in point:



Broke up ten fucking years ago . . .

Take your culture and shove it up your abandoned paper mill

It's sinking in that in the best-case professional scenario of the moment, I'm going to be working two jobs for the next eleven months. Or 1.5 jobs. Oh well, if I'm awake and forced to be at my desk I may as well be working. It's all for a good cause - working from home in a self-directed manner in the Antipodean subtropics - and hopefully I'll find out whether it's a realistic cause by Christmas.

A European friend of ours who recently moved to the Antipodes was over recently and was enthusiastic about the Antipodes, but said that she missed European culture. Missed walking into an old cathedral or something and breathing in the musty, aging air of culture. Me . . . I'm fucking sick of culture, as evidenced by my shitty, ungrateful attitude to Istanbul, which has more culture in its little finger than this whole damn stupid country I live in has in all its museums and churches sewn together. I never really thought I'd get to this point but here I am. I look at a lovely church and see underpaid tradesmen who kept falling to their deaths in defence of a spiritually neutered, murderous state religion. I look at castles and I see an army barracks housing bands of armed fucking thugs. I look at a museum and I see an august history of theft and colonial exploitation. I'm having a hard time appreciating things.

But what I am appreciating in Europe, and I don't know if this is from the part of me that liked the Cure when I was a teenager or if it's just some sort of shift in my brain that's making a Marxist cycle of history the driving thing behind how I'm looking at the world, is the rot and the abandon. The old factories and mines and rotting bourgeois homes, the remaining evidence that this is a continent that used to really, really matter, and now it fucking doesn't. You know where this is going, right? Pictures to follow.

The gamut from delicious to creepy

True to my word, I spent two or three hours of the weekend foraging. Though probably a better word for it would be exploring, since we stayed in the city. The thing that I failed to mention last time was that Europe is very dirty, particularly its cities, and Brussels is one of the dirtiest as far as the north goes. So I hesitate to pick and eat things that have spent their entire life cycle being peed on by dogs or drunks, or inhaling car exhaust straight from the muffler. For example, we have a chestnut tree nearby that I was going to strip until I actually took in its position (dog park, next to busy road, with two drunks sitting at a park bench nearby) and sqeamishness won, especially as I don't like chestnuts all that much.

Mushrooms, however, are fair game. They don't spend that much time growing above ground, so I figure if I find them when they're young, they haven't had time to get peed on or exhausted or such like. And we've had a bizarre combination of patches of warmth with patches of heavy rain, so this weekend there were quite a few mushrooms in my secret mushroom hideouts. But again, the right word is still 'exploring'. I found enough of the very recognizable stump mushrooms to get us the base for two meals, so that was nice, but then I found two other kinds of mushrooms I'm still trying to identify. (Everything I know about mushrooms I learnt from my father, and father only picks four, maybe five kinds, and I don't know everything my father knows. So I don't know all that much.)

One of the other kinds were growing on a stump too, so I have a good feeling about them. In fact I wanted to eat them instinctively. But I have a very bad feeling about these, so much so I didn't even take a sample home for photographing to send to my father:






Don't they look like little ghosts? Like dead things coming out of the soft ground after a rain. God, mushrooms can be creepy. But these ones are extra odd. They don't have any gills underneath - the underneath is as smooth as the outside. Fucking weird mushrooms. I wonder if they came from the same beginning-of-life event that plants and animals did. I believe I've read that sponges may not have. I wonder.

Suicide trees of the world

So this feeling of liking trees better than people probably has a lot to do with social dissatisfactions springing from the unsavoury things being done to and with trees that I come across at my job. A lot of it probably also has something to do with getting really high and watching The Private Life of Plants and thinking it was just the coolest thing ever. (Still do.) A lot more of it also has to do with growing up with a surfeit of trees and a deficit of people, while presently living in a situation with a deficit of trees and a surfeit of people.

(Almost funny story: a couple of nights ago, we were walking home and I - ever a pleasure to live with - was maintaining an unbroken stream of profanities about stupid Belgian wankers, et cetera, incapable of all of the fundaments of livable civilized organization, et cetera, plus the weather sucks . . . on the last stretch, the F-word broke in to request I shut up so we could concentrate on enjoying the evening air. I obliged, but almost without missing a beat a guy ten feet in front of us started being violently, noisily, extendedly sick on the pavement, and a yelling drunk chick thirty feet in front of us started leaning on her car horn. Neither stopped until after the arrival home. Nearly a moment of win, except it was really disgusting and annoying.)

Anyways, wherever the liking-trees-better-than-people has come from, obviously it's made me quite interested in trees, and the more I find out the more interested I'm getting. They are so fucking cool and their reproductive strategies are mind-blowing - or rather, their life cycles are mind-blowing, in the sense that time and mortality to a tree mean something completely different than what time and mortality mean to an animal, that is to us.

I guess the most remarkable example, because of the way these different conceptions of time and mortality intercept with a homonym, is the suicide tree. Say it to some people, and they'll think of the cerbera odollam, an Indian/Malagasy swampy tree, used as an ornamental, whose kernels have been used countless thousands of times to stop the beating of otherwise healthy human hearts in some of the most crowded and impoverished parts of the planet, where our race's life has been, as a generality, fruitful and yet horrendously, unignorably short. And yet not short enough for some. (That having been said there are an awful lot of them in Kerala, which is a remarkable place.)

Say it to others and they'll think of the tachigali versicolor, a central American jungle-y rainforest-y tree that lives to be about a hundred years old, grows to about 50 meters tall, flowers once, and then dies. The thinking goes that the gap it creates in the forest canopy by its death benefits its saplings by letting them get a little more light than they would otherwise, and that the benefit of releasing seeds so seldom (the species has a seeding event every five years or so) is that predators are rather less likely to eat them or the saplings: flowering, seeding and sprouting so intermittently, they would never be a primary food source that predators would learn or evolve to rely on.

The land where nerds make their point through song and dance

This came in from two different people within twelve hours, who I think are both happy for me, in that I'm moving to such a dicky country:




I'm happy for me too. (CSIRO, BTW, is an institution even my art-school educated 6-year-expat Antipodean knows about and respects. I guess the Canadian equivalent would be . . . errrrm . . . I'm stuck on that one actually. Probably Neil Young or something.)

The long pigs forage

There's a special joy in foraging. You mushroomers know it. And I'm going to forage the fuck out of Europe until we leave, it's one of my resolutions. Last weekend in Neuss, for example, we foraged for chestnuts, and then when I went out for my morning constitutional yesterday, they were just lying there in the Dudenpark. And it turns out harvesting those fuckers is irresistible. All you do is step on them and they pop out of their horridly spiky casings and there they all, all shiny and begging to be picked up. And for whatever reason, there's a bumper crop this year, so there are great crowds of people pawing and foraging away all over the place. It reminds me, in a rather nice way, how like pigs we are as a species, pawing and foraging away. But those poor fuckers have to use their faces to pick up food, and we have opposable thumbs.

I wonder where we deviated from pigs on the tree of life, considering we have so many of the same eating habits and we can use their organs and apparently we taste just like they do. That never seems be something writers on evolution point out. I wish they would, it's shit like this I want to know, not having it be proved for the umpteenth time that birds are actually dinosaurs. I fucking know that already. Just listen to these fucking birds and tell me they don't sound like fucking dinosaurs:



It's very pretty though.

Less foragey and still foody is the balcony garden. On Monday the remains of all but two of the cucumbers came out with a few mini-ones for the salad that night; yesterday, I ripped up one finished tomato plant and the peas, which were finished ages ago of course, but whose skeletons one of the cucumber plant had been using for support (it's so fucking frustrating to have so little space, but patience, Spliffe, patience, your back garden will come). The rest of the tomato plants are still going fairly strong; up until this weekend we'd been having an unseasonably warm and sunny fall so they're actually peaking just now - don't know if they can pull through without a frost though. The pepper plants are going gangbusters but I don't think the F-word gave them enough container room so I don't know how they'll wind up.

Small sense of panic . . . when the plants are all finished, we have to tape the balcony back up for the winter to keep out the brutal Art Nouveau drafts. Fuck, I hate winter. Oh well, I'll find a way to enjoy it. Next year, baby - sub-tropics.

Freezers full of joy

I'm not the sharpest knife in the drawer. I spent wide swathes of my life being in places where I was the sharpest knife in the drawer, or at least where I could believe I was, and now I'm not, or at least am no longer capable of believing I am. Fine. I'm making my peace with that. Also periodically there're big reminders I'm not that bright, such as on Friday night, when I went out to the big grocery store to get some other things along with the obligatory beer, saw that it was closed, and went around the corner to the Polish store (and here's where I'm not so bright) for the first time in the 2.4 years I've lived in Brussels.

First of all and obviously they had beer, and being the lightweight new worlder I am I like Polish beer better than Belgian beer, because it's more refreshing and less alcoholic. So good. But then and much more importantly, they had two freezers full of different kind of perogies. After I whine for years - literally, for years - about how I haven't had perogies for years, I go to a fucking store a fucking ten minute walk away from my house and they have two fucking freezers full of perogies. And they have kefir. Poles drink kefir. I knew that, in some shady semi-conscious tranche of my brain, but not being that bright the connections hadn't been made between that tranche of my brain and the tranche that decides where to go to try to buy some fucking kefir, so I've been going to Turkish shops and health food shops and big groceterias and wondering why I couldn't find anything full-fat. Well no more.

Anyways, going to the Polish store and such things are all part of my quest to take the hell of the advantage out of the eleven months we have left here, Brussels as well as the surrounds. I really don't know when or if I'll be back in Europe after we leave. It's hard to believe I'll never be back, but not impossible; we'll never be rich, and I'll want to spend my long-haul vacations in Canada, for obvious reasons. So I'm bearing in mind that this may be my swansong, and bearing in mind that there will almost certainly be a time in the next few years when I look back with nostalgia on my time in Europe, and I'll want the absolute minimum of regrets about whatever in that nostalgia, and the maximum self-congratulation in terms of all the awesomeness.

Still . . . yesterday La New Yorkaise flagged she'd be moving back to the New World before Christmas and I got really jealous.

In which beauty cures recreational poisoning

The weekend in Germany was nice, and has produced the desired effect back-to-back with the weekend in Dordrecht: I really want to stay in Brussels next weekend. Saturday was Unity Day, a stat holiday there, which was good because we were town-bound and if the stores had been open I would have shopped - I'm feeling flush at the moment - even though I don't NEED need anything, because Dusseldorf is a marvellous city for shopping and, whilst expensive in German terms, is damn cheap compared to this price-controlled, socialimistic country I live in.

So we went to Wuppertal, a very pretty industrial/valley town that reminded me of the formerly industrial bits of Yorkshire. The difference is, of course, it hasn't fallen into complete neglect since its heyday ended - not the West German Way, I suppose. It has a suspended monorail, which is awesome and hardly takes up any space since most of its run is over the Wupper (which is full of birds, I think we saw maybe 15 herons or cranes going through the city). A very pretty, efficient thing. Testament to human lack of affiliation with prettiness and efficiency that there aren't more of them elsewhere.

Sunday morning I managed to shake of the effects of far too much drink and smoke and consequent poisoning (and disappointment in it being far too cold for these thin-blooded Europeans and my Antipodean to kayak, though I was in no shape for any kind of physical effort) to join the others at the Hombroich museum island close to Neuss. I don't know the last time I've seen something so lovely. Everything about it was superb - what they had on display, the lunch (included with ticket), and the willows next to the cafeteria with branches drooping to the ground, under which they'd set out tables we could enjoy with the early-winter sun, that kept popping in and out. We'll certainly go back in another season before leaving Europe. It was something that touched me in the same way was the Guell park in Barcelona: so pretty, such a good idea, and a sort of yearning that everybody everywhere in every city have a the chance to have something like that there, something so goddamn lovely.

The Red Dragon wants to keep it fucking simple

In our ongoing practice and experimentation preceding a planned serious hippy-out in eleven months, we've gone four fifths of the way to deciding that we're going to try to live without an electric washing machine. Or the laundrette. Or dirty clothes. Or nudism. Instead we're getting a Wonder Wash and a spin dryer. I'd like to tell you it's because of our desire to live a greener lifestyle or some such shit, but of course you know me too well (erm, how many long haul flights have I been on in Q3 2009? I think it was six but I may have forgotten about a couple already . . . and how many will I be taking annually after moving to the Dustbowl Down Under? I'd have to plant the fucking Amazon to make up for that shit) and the truth is that when our washing machine died a couple of weeks ago, so did my fucking patience. I'm fucking tired of dealing with a kajillion household items I don't fucking understand so that when they fucking die I have to call some fucking cunt to come fix it for some fucking extortionate price.

Also we're leaving Brussels in eleven months, as noted above, and I don't feel like sinking another €150 into another used unit (even though €150 is quite a bit less than €450, which is what the new washing machines start at here) if there's a possibility I can just sink €50 into a Wonder Wash and a used spin dryer for largely the same results.

Finally I want to check into the Vatican's assertion that the washing machine was a greater boon for the women's liberation movement than the birth control pill. God knows, personally speaking, I'm no great fan of the pill, but God also knows I'm no great fucking fan of the Vatican, so I have to do some personal experimentation before believing the shit that it comes out with. There's a slight problem in our household, ergo est the man does most of the laundry here, but I can ask him how liberated, or not, he feels with the new eqipment and try to run some hypothetical models to see how liberated, or not, a woman would feel in his place.

The trough behind the wave

My brain is nearly broken today. Too much stress but good prospects of it easing off, and a trip to Germany planned for the weekend. With more kayaking. Yay! That will make five countries I've kayaked in. Not bad for someone who hardly knows how to fucking kayak. Next summer I'm going to treat myself to some real coursework with rolls and rapids and things like that. For now it's just the pretty.

Reading The Economic Decline of Empires. You know, for fun. I've only read the first one about the late Roman empire and I'm close to following my advice to Sam - chucking my household into a car and driving away like a madwoman, because it's open season for the rich! So us.

This came in the mail yesterday. I have to start paying more attention to TED.

Thar be monsters

This is a super-stressful week at work, the sort of week that makes me zone out on videos of kittens and unchallenging American sitcoms just so my brain can untense enough for me to be reasonable with the F-word and then fall asleep. But instead, last night, I watched Coast and then, from the same provider, a BBC documentary about lake monsters.

Coast is a cute show. I don't know if I'll watch the 2 to 4th series, though, as they get rid of the skinny geographer host whose endearing manner reminds me of Geoff the First Time Cottager and put pretty Scottish longhair Neil Oliver on the marqée instead. If I want hot, I'll go ogle the chef at my favourite pizzeria, thank you, when I go to the BBC I want pure fucking geek. Also my part of the coast gets covered in the first series, and now that it's behind me I find myself not caring as much anymore.



We'll see.

The monster one was great. I have a thing for people who spend loads of time and money hunting lake monsters. There's something really sweet about it, almost as sweet as it is silly, but I also find it annoying, as there are so many really phenomonally beautiful and interesting things in the world that actually exist, and why not gawk at those?

But since I started kayaking alone once in awhile, I understand the psychology of sightings a little better. When it's silent and the water is dark, and shapes loom out of it occasionally, and the sounds are odd and once in awhile the way the waves hit your boat sounds like a big solid thing brushing against it, all that shit could be anything. I nearly screamed once on the La Vase when I spotted some bizarre bladdery water weeds because I thought they were a corpse - it took seconds of frantic reasoning with myself to keep looking at them instead of paddling away like a madwoman, and realize they were bladdery water weeds. Also once in Scotland I saw a seal playing on the surface of Loch Lomond, and the way those wee animals swim around, weaving up and down on the surface of the water, looks like all the classic bumpy monster descriptions.

Anyways, here's the documentary, it's good for the evenings your brain hurts and you want to hear the funny way people from Vermont and upstate New York talk.

The director maintained that Geimer was sexually experienced and consented

I wonder if I'd have more sympathy for that kiddy fiddling frog if I liked his shitty movies any better, but even Chinatown left me cold. I'm pretty fond of Charlie Chaplin, after all, who also ditched the States for Europe after banging teenagers. Somehow it doesn't seem like the same thing though. Call me naive but I believe Chaplin's kiddy-fiddling ways never ran to acting like he was the victim of a Lolita and a puritan conspiracy when he got into trouble for giving a thirteen year old Qualudes, stuffing his cock into all of her orifices while she told him not to, and then running off to Europe because he didn't know what the big fucking deal was after he'd told the law, yeah, sure, he'd done it, and what's more the girl hadn't been unresponsive. Damn those Yankee prudes!

But it's alright, Hollywood types are flocking to his defence, using big words like "philistine collusion" that I'm pretty sure they're not aware of the actual literal meaning of, because let's face it - actors aren't paid to not be absolute fucking morons who don't know when to shut up, which is part of what makes the US's cultural and political dialogue so fucking simple-minded. And the French government is leaping in too; why should one of their more successful citizens be thrown to the lions because of ancient history? Sadly the cinematic tastes of the French cultural elite don't outweigh the 'scary' way California doesn't have a statute of limitations on skipping the country when you've pled guilty to drugging and raping a 13-year-old. God, I hate the French political class. Fucking chinless misogynistic dysfunctional emasculated elitist losers.

Have these semi-literate fucktards actually sat through Bitter Moon? The mediocre little turd should have been locked up for that moronic waste of the time/space continuum alone. Only in a culturally impotent vaccuum like western Europe could a man who managed to make sado-masochism gloomy, stupid AND boring get any cultural traction, certainly enough for national ministers to have a little hissy fit when he gets arrested for kiddy-fiddling. Hyperbole aside, just tell me what other culture he could have managed that in. You can't because there fucking isn't one. Fucking hell.

Beneluxury

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

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

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

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

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

Weekenders in places with names I can't pronounce

Yesterday I called to book 'our' place in the Ardennes, and it was full . . . as was every other place in the area. And despite the dreadful yet fruitful agony of having obtained my full license, I'm not yet allowed to rent a car here - you need to have had the permit for two years - and the F-word won't, so I spent a panicked hour searching for somewhere else to kayak and get fresh air that we could get to with trains.

Well, thank god for this disorganized industrial shithole of a country being next to the Netherlands. We're going here. Dordrecht. An hour and a half away, I've managed to book some boats that look much nicer than the tubs in the Ardennes, and it's next to this, so it's going to be fucking awesome, I'm pretty sure. Even if it pisses down rain all weekend (and we seem to be in the grip of some sort of wildly geographically misplaced Indian summer here so I don't think it will), I'm pretty sure we'll get a lot out of going to a place with folklore this bizarre.

God, I love the Dutch. Not just for the social liberalism and their stunning good looks. I love their weird, too. I'd love Belgians' wierd as well, but it seems to segue into creep far too often for comfort. I think it will be a good policy to spend the maximum amount of time in the Netherlands before we leave. It's just so much less annoying. Shame about the food but one always manages.

Speaking of food, this site makes me hungry.

Tai chi is a kind of martial art, I suppose

Really need the brief escape to the Ardennes this weekend. Last night in tai chi I spent about 15 minutes of what should have been pure tranquility, what should have been my mid-week détente with my professional stress, wanting to punch these dumb gallic bitches who wouldn't stop chattering in their dumb gallic high-pitched squeaky little voices during the exercises. Punch them right in the mouths. It doesn't matter that I'd cut my hand on their teeth and get an infection, I thought. It'd be worth it. I'd enjoy the memory all my life, long after the antibiotics stop making me poo funny.

Of course I didn't. It would have embarrassed the F-word, who was there too. And even though I certainly wouldn't go to prison as they're too full in this retarded country for anybody who gets a sentence under three years to actually be incarcerated, and even if I did I could just escape via helicopter because these fucking fuckwits here are too fuckwitted to co-ordinate putting up a couple of goddamn wires (the prison in the story, BTW, is a seven-minute walk from our place), it might interfere with my Australian residency application. Lucky gallic bitches.

Anyways, I have my doubts about the tai chi class this year. Too many chattering gallic bitches, it's been moved from seven minutes away (directly across from the prison in the story, actually) to fifteen minutes away, and the timing is way off - 20h30 to 22h. That means I have to eat before-hand, but Wednesday being deadline day I can't do so early enough in the evening to avoid feeling like I'm going through the session with a bowling ball in my tummy. Also I find tai chi beautifully energizing, which means I don't really get any sleep Wednesday nights anymore. And finally, 20h30 is usually the time, these days, that my professional stress catches up with me and I get really good-for-nothing exhausted, making it fucking penitential to go out into the fucking Nordic darkness of the early autumn nightfall.

The office monkey got her groove back

I've got my groove back at work, thank god. When fresh back from Canada, I couldn't really imagine getting it back ever again. But then Big Report Weeks came and my motivation managed to rise to the challenge, and now I'm sufficiently psyched to be awesome for another year.

Also significant is that my company may have something for me when we make the big move to to the Dustbowl Down Under - nothing close to decided on that score yet - but I'm already doing some tasks associated with the possibility that are very congenial to me, I think more congenial than what I'm doing now, if I can learn how to get good at them. Also one gets the sense Australia is about to descend into chaos so it would be good to have a nice fat slice of income coming in from abroad.

Yeah . . . so many disastrous things get reported about Australia that it gets to sounding apocalyptic, especially in view of the Mad Max Factor. I have visions of myself clutching up my family in five years time and bustling them off to the frigid safety of Canada's backwoods as leathered sodomites on motorcycles chase the townspeople through endless vistas of flood, fire, snakes and blood-red dust while Nick Cave sings "Tupelo".



So you see why I've got to go, right, I mean that sounds fucking awesome.

But when you speak to Australians they claim all the apocalyptic press is just British journalists being monumentally jealous of Australians getting to live in Australia while British journalists have to live in a moldy, violent shithole like Britain where everybody is as drunk as in Australia but they have to live much closer together. And being acquainted with what kind of shitholes the parts of Britain people actually live in are, it's a possibility I really can't discount.

Who knows? Me, hopefully, and soon.

Buck up - never say die! We'll get along

I think I've found my political Messiah . . . pity he's a kiddie-fiddler who's been dead for 32 years. Oh well. There have been dumber ideological choices made, as mine is on the basis of this rather wonderful movie:



What I noticed all through it is that the pacing is superb. No dead space, no holes. It's an extremely well put-together film, aside from the funniness factor - far better than most American films made before the 50's in terms of just being spectacularly well put-together. And it's fucking funny. Particularly for us pinko stoners.

BTW - here's a Guarniad review from 1936 about the film. It must have been strange back in the days when newspaper entertainment section writers were allowed to use the present perfect and words like "undeliberating". Keep on to the end, to the section about how the Nazis banned it, and of course the moustache . . .

In which I fail to count my blessings

People, I'm fucked up. I know I'm fucked up because I was wandering around Istanbul bored off my tits yesterday afternoon, wishing - actually actively desiring - that all the people around me were trees instead.

I don't know whether or not I can really recommend Istanbul as a vacation destination, I don't have enough information after five days. The 'social programme' of the conference would have made me come in my panties five years ago; dinner in a giant Byzantine water cistern, a cruise down the Bosphorus, black tie gala in an early 20th century vizier's yali. But I spent it ovulating, wishing that I was being ploughed by the single attractive man at that fucking sausage-fest of a conference, studiously avoiding him in defense of my monogamism, and thinking about how all the breathtakingly beautiful things I was looking at were representative of a long and super-successful massive oppression of man by his fellow man. I'm fucking laugh-a-minute, people. Laugh-a-fucking-minute.

It was a relief to hit Saturday morning and run away to my much cheaper hotel and to all the sights I wanted to see. The Hagia Sophia, or as a particularly retarded American woman who was accompanying her husband to the conference called it with a rather shocking familiarity, "Sophia"* , was very beautiful and it satisfied the part of me who had had to study it a kajillion times in sundry art and architecture classes to explore it. But not being in a particularly arty frame of mind I was much more impressed by the Blue Mosque next door, which frankly was tidier, and still functioning as a religious institution. I was handed a pamphlet on the joys of Islam on my way in and was so impressed and so moved by the interior that I nearly read it.

And there were lots of other wondrous things about the city, but I only had two days to look at them, which means I didn't even scrape the surface - what I did was the equivalent of going to Paris, walking from the Arc de Triomphe to the Louvre to Notre-Dame and Sainte-Chapelle, with a quick trip up to the Marché aux Puces (Grand Bazaar, which was nice, I found a bunch of super-cheap fabric). That's why I can't say whether or not I recommend Istanbul as a vacation destination - I still don't know shit about it - not much more than I knew before.

Also, as I mentioned, people, I'm fucked up. It didn't feel exotic to me, it didn't feel exciting; it felt like every other big Mediterranean city I've been to, with touts yelling about how awesome the shit they were selling was, and too many men trying to chat me up in the quest for some fast tail or a North American residency visa, and too many people wandering around, and too many tourists speaking stupidities in snatches of languages I understood, and too much dirt on the ground and shit in the air, and too many drivers acting like brainless cunts.

And I know this sort of misplaced indifference, this 'it's all the fucking same anyways', is a symptom of depression, but I've been depressed, and this isn't depression. This is misanthropy, running away with me. I don't get homesick in the normal sense of the word - I miss my family desperately sometimes, but I don't particularly want to be back in Canada - but sometime in the middle of the Istanbul trip, when I realized that my brain was approaching the experience as simply another stay in a place with too many damn people in it, I thought of so much yearning of kayaking down the La Vase with no people in sight, or right in Lake Nipissing far away from everything, or hiking through the woods with my family, that the tears started to my eyes.

I may as well face it. I was raised in the middle of nowhere, isolated, and while I spent a lot of the time I was being raised wishing that I was somewhere with more people, trees and fresh air were my constant companions and trees and fresh air are probably where I need to go. Particularly on my vacations, since the wait until I can take myself there more permanently seems interminable. Taking a break from one dirty overcrowded city full of annoying people to go to another has turned out to not be such a hot experience.

Whine . . . complete.

*As in, "the mosaics in Sophia weren't that great. Now look at my photos of them." That wasn't what I was basing my evaluation of her retardation on, BTW - more on her opinion of what a shame it was all the black people who didn't know what they were doing turned out to vote Democrat last year instead of staying home like they usually do. Sure lady, like white Americans have a fucking clue what they're doing if they're trying out any task more complicated than stuffing their fucking cracker face with Twinkies or changing the channel from Fox to Fox News. Of course, there are always exceptions, like anyone reading this blog. Smile.

How can something so wrong feel so right?

So today at the conference there was a two point five hour session that had nothing to do, even tangentially, with anything I have anything to do with, so I got my first Turkish bath. I made the mistake of reading about them on Wikipedia right before I went in an effort to not commit any massive nude-y faux pas, which left me agonizing while I lay naked on the hot marble slab about using an institution with so many historical associations with the most exploitative kind of sex slavery. I won't say the agony stopped once the attendant came in, took off her clothes, and started exfoliating me all over; in fact in a certain moral sense it got worse when I realized halfway through that I was 75% passively ready for the dirtiest possible scenario in which the situation could go. But it was still a really lovely experience, particularly getting covered with bubbles and massaged.

But do I reccommend it? I don't know. It's causing me the same level, if not the same brand of moral confusion and disturbance the Berlin Zoo did the last time I skipped out of a conference to enjoy myself. In a certain sense I don't think you should be in a position where you should be able to pay someone to wash you for pleasure; it offends my communist sensibilities. And yet my hard-nosed capitalist side says it's my economic duty as a monied person to hire less monied people to do things for me, even things that my cultural upbringing informs me are actually my job, or possibly the F-word's, except our bathroom is too unromantic.

And then the psychoanalyzed side of me informs me it's fucking weird, though obviously completely predictable, that it's such a pleasurable and relaxing experience to be so infantilized by a woman my age (the attendant) taking a role no-one has taken since my mother when I was about three years old. My psychoanalyzed side is also informing me it's wierd I'm caring about being cleaned off by a professional when I've got undressed and massaged by a kajillion different professional therapists without ever questioning anything about anything except that it was awesome.

I don't know. My guess is I'll probably do it again, though not at a five-star hotel, because the stale atmosphere of bourgeois decadence and entitlement is probably what's killing my buzz. The thing is in view of my nut allergy my pleasures are a little limited here - about 3/4 of the food is off limits - so I'm looking for other ways to spoil myself - I guess this is why I've never travelled in Asia. Oh well, there are enough other nice things, I'll just keep eating bananas and watermelon. Maybe it can turn into some awesome new fad diet.

The worst joke in the world

Q: What's a five star hotel in Istanbul exactly like?

A: Every other fucking five star hotel in the world.

All over continental Europe, even the bit the other Europeans argue isn't Europe (and this place is fucking Europe, man, it's obvious in everything from the way people dress to the way they overcook their vegetables) it's the same fucking story: anodyne marble and carpet without any ununiformed proles; a Holiday Inn with a health spa and a shitload of overpampered congress delegates.

Fuckin' speed the weekend.

Eating the balcony

Feeling better, on the mend-ish. Still pretty gross but enjoying staying in my pyjamas all day. Someday life will be like this, and not just when I've got a fucking pandemic.

Not much other news that's fit to print today, so a garden update. My aloe pups, apparently while I've been in Canada, have taken off and look quite good. Christmas presents! Yay! The tomatilloes have also finally taken off too, at least somewhat, on their second flowering; we have five or six fruit on the go. And the capsicum are fruiting too. The lemon cucumbers have done very well, and are still producing; I've lost count of what we've got off them. Not enough for pickling, though - just stuffing in our faces right off the vine. The peas have been and gone, really minimally, but Daddy had warned us not to expect anything out of peas in containers, so I'm not upset.

The tomatoes have been the biggest disappointment so far - no potash and they've mostly got rot spots. Well, we won't make that mistake again. They're still fruiting. We'll see how gentle the autumn is and what we can get out of it - but it's all experimental at this point, in anticipation of life with a fucking garden, man. In Australia we'll have a constant growing season and will actually be able to feed ourselves a fair go - like when I was a child. I want to be ready. I feel ready. It's hard to wait, in fact.

In the meantime, I haven't quite made up my mind if next summer we'll garden again or if I'll have a go at raising some dragon trees for private sale in the nicer pots. A bit of column A and a bit of column B, I think.

Filthy swine

I've got swine flu, the friendly house-call doctor reckons. House calls. They're awesome. I didn't even have to change out of my pyjamas. It's good to know I can drop out of wondering about commercial-ethical problems with conventional medicine and whether the vaccine race is a big circular scammy money maker or not now because, well, I've already got it, don't I? I fucking knew this would happen. What don't I get that's catchable through nose-picking? Fuck.

He also said that based on when my symptoms began I won't be infectious anymore by Wednesday, so I can still go to Istanbul . . . working on the assumption that the city is open for business after the floods. The rain has stopped and the conference organizers, who are no doubt shitting themselves, have sent out reassuring emails about how everything is still a go. Personally I want the food that will be attached to the conference so bad that I'll cry if it isn't a go. But I really, really don't want to go in for any disaster tourism.

We meant to get me some tree-time this weekend in one of the few national parks Belgium boasts but I was too sick, so instead we watched Bruno and 30 Rock. Bruno was pretty funny, I guess. I liked his assistant, who I can't find out anything about except that he's Swedish, which is probably why he consented to do such outrageous things that would be widely considered career killers outside of Scandinavia. You have to admire the balls of it all but I guess I'd been expecting too much and only got three or four belly-laughs out of the experience. 30 Rock, of course, I love. What a great show. I wrote before it's no Arrested Development and it's true, but it's as good in its own way. Such great characters. At least one belly-laugh per 20-minute episode. The last one that nearly made me die, as the swine flu is putting some fairly severe limits on my respiratory abilities, was:

Kenneth: Well, you know what they say: 'Money is the root of all evil.'
Tracey: I thought that was just a tag line for my movie, Death Bank.

It was actually sort of scary, I think the F-word was mere moments away from calling me an ambulance. . . .

Everything is still about me

I feel a little better about Jemima because now my mum and dad are both taking her out for paddles quite regularly. I was shocked my dad is taking her out. He has a cat-like relationship with water. But I must have enthused enough because apparently he's taken to it like crazy. That makes me happy. I still miss her but I'm glad she's getting some without me, and say what you will about the inappropriacy of love for inanimate objects, but that's a less selfish emotion than I've ever been able to drum up for any man I've ever nailed.

In other news, much of the major flooding in Istanbul rolled out on the highway between the aeroport and the centre. We've gotten reassuring letters from the conference organizers about how everything is still a go but I suppose I'll reserve judgement until the day before or the morning of. I'll be very sad if I can't go there after wanting to for so long, but I'm not into disaster tourism. All those poor people.

So much rain, so little water

Sigh. A week today is the last time I went kayaking, with my awesome nephew, on Lake Ontario. I miss my family incredibly and I miss kayaking too, not quite as much as my family but pretty bad, and I miss my kayak. According to all that market profiling I used to have to follow, I have a real masculine streak when it comes to toys - I don't buy a lot of them, but when I do I research the hell out of them and then just love love love them when I get them. And I love Jemima. She was money well spent just for the use I got out of her over two weeks, and now Mum is taking her out, and the kids and my brothers will too, hopefully, and I will too when I go home - I don't regret the purchase at all but I was not expecting this horrible sensation of missing her so bad.

And so futilely. What would I do if she was here? In this fucking waterless city. This fuck-all of a city. This fucking pavé jungle of a city. I could have every kayak in the world here and I'd still be fucked. Except I could sell them and use the money to move to a better fucking city with some fucking water in it. Sigh.

All this whining just to get to a point that actually is of fairly universal interest: a couple of weeks of kayaking for a couple of hours every morning totally made my tits way more perky, and I was already pretty happy with my tits. I've had to revise my plan to get them chopped off when I turn 50 and they're no longer good for much besides hindering me when I run for trains: instead I'm just going to move to a place with some water in it and kayak for a few hours every day. And hopefully, so doing, the ladies will accompany me into a ripe old age, standing proud until the end.

Maybe the songbirds needed universal healthcare

Canada was a little funny. Missing it in a fierce and generalized sense at the moment because everybody was just a little polite to each other - a sort of generalized, unconscious consent to not be absolute bastards to everyone around you in the unvocalized understanding that it would help stop everyone, including you, from losing their shit. Not an understanding that's penetrated too far into the Belgian unconsciousness, I'll fucking tell you that. Also it was cleaner, the air even in Toronto was roughly 50 times more breathable than here, and there were lots of birds and crickets, again even in Toronto. I was a little unnerved this morning when I listened to how quiet it was - just the screeching invasive parrots and the magpies - though I did miss the magpies. Just birds left here, essentially, who have good enough reasoning skills to change their eating habits to be eating our shit instead of all the native insects and vegetation millenia of too many fucking Europeans has killed off.

Anyways, that was a bit tangential, when what I wanted to write was that Canada is a little weird because nobody there called it 'swine flu' anymore, they all called it H1N1, and there were hand sanitizers fuckin' everywhere. I guess a bunch of people there died of SARS so the caution is a little excessive; either that or we've been living next to those paranoiacs in the States for too long.

Speaking of paranoiacs in the States, and health, my boss sent me this clip:



I've been doing my level best to just ignore what's happening in the States now because it just drives me batshit. I can have a higher level of discourse with my used menstrual pads and as far as anyone has been able to figure out my only diagnosable mental disorder is SAD. It did feel nice to see some old Jewish guy (he is Jewish, right? I have this game I like playing here in Europe called "gay or French", and when it comes to Americans I'm thinking of starting one called "eloquent or Jewish") respond to the healthcare/Nazi thing as it deserved to be responded to - which is, not.

But the very fact that question gets asked in a public forum - how ass-clenchingly embarassing. I'm starting to feel guilty that the US is going high comedy as it turns in on itself - that like Italy, it's just turning into a place you can laugh at until you cry. But I guess the big difference is in the States the electorate handed out such a clear whine for change and if they don't get it they won't deserve not getting it. I don't know, man. It's like watching a car crash that can either end in absolute fucking carnage (likely) or a perfect triple-axle spin and triumphant landing on the opposite lane, speeding off in the other direction (less likely, judging from the historical record).

And this little piggy cried "waaaaaaah" all the way home

Back to work today - yesterday worked from home, which is completely different. Gah. This little time coming up won't be days of wine and roses but at least I get to go to Turkey next week. Extra painful because the F-word is back at school now, and I hadn't fully realized how much I like him being on vacation (ie, more present, less stressed)- combined with not having quite realizing how much I'd missed him. In a healthy world I'd be able to cuddle him all day today, getting it out of my system. In this unhealthy world, we'll both work ridiculous hours, come home cranky, and I'll snap at him when he treads in my cat's puke and fails to clean it up and he'll snap at me when I do whatever revolting, inconsiderate thing it is I do, and the cuddles will be under-realized.

Fuck you, work.

At the moment, also missing my family and my kayak like crazy. My family rather more. Especially the kids. It does my head in to be so far away from the kids. And Luke Duke too - I don't have favourites but he's the one who's always been most present whilst having the excuses to be the least present, so it's usually rather more of a tear to go away from him. God, they're so great. And while there was no hesitation in my heart about rushing back to my lover, I am FUCKING PISSED to be in this stupid shithole of a country if I must be away from my awesome family. Oh my god, what a nasty, soulless crappery Francophone Europe is.

I knew I was fucking home when I went to the TGV platform at Charles de Gaulle aeroport, put up my feet, waited for my 7:45 train, and got told off by some cunt of an SNCF worker for waiting on the platform when my train had just been cancelled, and to get up to the main concourse immediately to find out what I'd have to do to move my exhausted self and my fucking 70 kilos of luggage to Brussels instead. That's this fucking place, man. That's Francophone Europe. When some absolute bullocks happens to someone, like their train from one shitty European city they don't want to be in to another they don't want to go to getting cancelled when they've just been on a fucking overnight transatlantic flight and shed a kajillion tears saying goodbye to their awesome, awesome family, the institutional reaction is aggression to the victim.

And the thing that really fucking pisses me off about that is that it's not because of an unfocussed aggression or film-y frenchy existentialist angst or anything that fucking picturesque; it's pure fucking laziness, because minute-for-minute it saves time to pre-emptively aggress someone who might get justifiably angry into going away from where you are instead of just presenting the situation to them like a fucking grown-up and possibly having to listen to them get upset about their fucking, fucking train to Brussels getting cancelled.

One more year, one more year, one more year. I can do it. If the past two weeks flew by so unbearably fast, I can do it.

Wet rolls and dry panties

Alright, I don't know if it's not getting laid for a near-record (in the context of this living arrangement) of three weeks (my time in Canada plus the F-word's dad's time here - I'm a bit of a screamer and it's a smallish apartment) but Ken Whiting has suddenly become the sexiest thing on legs. Or on the water. Whatever. Damn. I watched his sea kayaking video with other people in my family who like kayaking the other day and liked it fine, but didn't realize until halfway through the plane ride back across the Atlantic more than 24 hours later that he's filthy hot. Those preternatural hips and that cute Ottawa valley accent. Is it just me? Possibly.


Anyways, after I realized Ken Whiting is filthy hot, I sat there watching Air France's marginally less-shitty-than-last-time cinematic offering, Ghosts of Girlfriends Past - oh, I don't know actually, it may have been as shitty as 17 Again - it'd be quite a shitfight between the two of those.

But I digress. I was sitting there watching Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, and thinking about how some Hollywood producer type somewhere was obviously expecting girls like me to wet their panties over Matthew McConnauwhatever, but my panties stayed dry, not only because I think it was intended to be a romantic comedy and romantic comedies don't get me there, but because Matthew McConnauwhatever doesn't demonstrate sea kayak rolls in swimming pools topless like Ken Whiting does. Also I'm pretty sure Matthew McConnauwhatever waxes, and I don't believe in men waxing. Even though I've seen plenty of them do it. It's just gross and it makes me wonder what sort of bizarro natural body-hair patterns they're trying to hide.

Cabbage soul

Kayaking on Lake Ontario was pretty nice. No wind but some interesting waves from all the big boats. Lots of birds. Passing right under the landing path for the abomination of the island aeroport, which was neat. And of course it's such an incredibly beautiful view of Toronto coming back from the Islands. The CN Tower may be a big awful eyesore, but the Toronto skyline taken as a whole is better for it. More depth.

Got some lovely time with Gigi and Lady and Gigi's fiancé last night. Walked from his condo to Luke Duke's place this morning, going past my old place through Cabbagetown on the way. Cabbagetown is probably the first neighborhood I've ever really loved and it's changing; I'm not frightfully comfortable with it. It's next to Regent Park and has a lot of crackheads wandering around, and that used to keep out the wrong class of people - you know, young urban professionals who move into a cool neighborhood because it's cool and then spend the next ten years writing angry letters to drive all the coolness out - kept out the Starbucks, in short; Cabbagetown sort of maintained this sense of cool and community since time immemorial, balanced between sketch and class, resisting anodyne gentrification in a way no other Toronto neighborhood I'm aware of, besides maybe the Junction, ever managed.

Well. There's a Starbucks there now, because Regent Park is being overhauled into a mixed income development, the crackheads are being slowly pushed out and the yuppies are moving in in droves. But the Starbucks is standing completely empty. Instead the yuppies are cluttering up Jet Fuel, where the bike couriers still go and where I had to wait ten minutes for my coffee, and the Tamil bakery up the street that does the strange cheese pastries, which I had a horrible 30 seconds thinking has closed until I saw in my desperation it had expanded into much nicer premises three doors down.

I'm hoping against hope the spirit of Cabbagetown will prevail.

Thoroughly terribly contemptible

Nice to be back in Toronto, up to a point. Heaven knows I don't consider Brussels a paragon of civic awesomeness and it's great to be back where there are so many Asians with their delicious, delicious restaurants, but this city has its own elements of shitholery that instinctively perhaps, because I'm my grandmother's granddaughter, I'm finding it pretty easy to be judgemental about. Case in point: you want me to pay $2.75 a ride for that piece of shit public transportation system? What? $2.fuckin75? Are you serious? You pay half that to be wafted around any major European capital, on much less circuitous, crippled and crowded routes, London excepted of course but then London is a bit of an exception to everything decent, that fucking shopping mall.

Kayaking with my nephew on Lake Ontario though - Brussels doesn't offer anything like that. I've already made the F-word promise we'd go on a kayaking holiday as soon as we can after I get back, which might be awhile because I'm going to Turkey almost immediately for work. Tough life.

Catharsis

So it's a lovely day and I'm off to go kayaking again, this time to see how far up the La Vase river I can get in Jemima, the boat I bought last week, which was not designed for seeing how far one can get up a river, being 14.5 feet long. And in terms of following the historical trade route portage, which I have no intention of doing this year, and little interest in doing next, I'm not really heading in the right direction, going upstream from the end, Champlain Park at Lake Nipissing, instead of starting from the beginning, Trout Lake (home of the monster, which had the good manners not to eat me on countless daytime and moonlit dips).

But it doesn't matter; in its lower reaches at the moment, the river has no current at all, especially as the lake is so high right now, the highest I've ever seen - the lower river is just some lazy loops through startlingly beautiful countryside, where yesterday I saw a grebe, a muskrat, some weirdo non-diving duck with a red head, and loveliest of all a very pretty doe, who I surprised drinking from the river just a couple of meters away from me, and who stared me down in evident shock and bewilderment with impossibly big black eyes until I passed her, at which moment she booted soundlessly away.

First, though, I have to sit here and finish this blog entry, because I have to have a morning shit before I leave, so I don't have to hurry back at any point. It's a bit odd but I'm absolutely uncomfortable taking a shit in the wilderness. I wonder if that's just me or if everyone is like that, and I wonder if the revulsion to the prospect has any evolutionary remnants mixed up in it from a time when we weren't at the top of the food chain and were afraid of being tracked by predators.

Anyways. Kayaking is lovable for a lot of reasons, and I could go on about them ad nauseum, and no doubt will some other time. But probably the most lovable thing about it is the degree to which it's literally and figuratively cathartic. My bad moods can never stand up to the first twenty minutes of paddling, particularly in such a lovely place as this (damn, my childhood in this fucking arse-end of the world would have been nicer if I'd had a boat!), and I do some really great thinking, accepting, and moving on whilst on the water. And I don't know if it's because of the nature of the physical exercise or because of the mental relaxingness of it all, but the body becomes pretty content, after half an hour or so, to start signalling it's ready to get rid of anything superfluous in there (hence the necessity of taking the morning shit before starting out).

This manifests itself most obviously, in me, with great rupturing belches that echo through the calm of the tranquil northern Ontario morning, blending in seamless harmony with the crickets, frogs, and birdsong - the tranquil northern Ontario morning being full of the jay family, particularly a bumper crop of blue jays this year, whose raucous loud calls are about as pleasant, objectively speaking, as a young woman belching.

The ones I've loved the longest

Actual dialogue from this weekend:

Mistress La Spliffe: I'm pretty sure he's not gay.
High School Buddy: What are you basing that on?
MLF: Partly on him telling you he's not gay.
HSB: Well, he just came up to me spontaneously and said "I'm not gay," why would he have done that if he wasn't gay?
MLS: Maybe because you'd been saying that you're sure he's gay when he was sitting behind us at the wedding table.
HSB: No.
MLS: You were speaking really loud.
HSB: Oh.

The shocking thing about that exchange was that as far as I could tell I was way the drunkest.

Back in North Bay now, although in a way you could hardly tell; London (Ontario) and North Bay are sister cities in drabness, poor roads and squatty ugly buildings, London being the larger, obese sister and North Bay being the pregnant 16-year-old sister living in a little trailer. It was a pretty great wedding. Good to see my group from highschool again, and eerie to watch us be us - that group from highschool again - making each other risk pissing ourselves with laughter - even as life and our own wilfulness takes us into all sorts of weirdo directions.

Getting from London back to Toronto, where we dined with Luke Duke and co. before dropping off Elvis at the aeroport, was much less pleasant. Very fucking unpleasant, actually. But that's life, nothing's for free, or even at the price you think it is, and it's over now. Horrible to drop off Elvis at the aeroport, too. I wish we all arrived and left at the same time, all these goodbyes do my fucking head in. And while this blog is obviously all about me and how awesome I am, there was a touch of dialogue between Elvis and Luke Duke I don't want to forget:

Elvis: We've got a really tiny backyard, so we've started guerilla gardening in a vacant lot down the street.
Luke Duke: Careful, that's how Che started out.

And just so he won't feel left out on the blog he doesn't even know exists, and because he, like the other two, is the master of the throwaway line:

Magnum: That's totally gone to shit. You probably guessed how already but I'll tell you all about it after we start drinking.

I am become She-Bogan, Destroyer of Taste

Yesterday was my first solo drive ever. And it was to the beer store to pick up a plank of 50, in my brother's pickup, wearing a home-made Wonder Woman singlet, Uggs, 30 visible blackfly bites, unwashed hair, and a miniskirt. I considered it a beautiful synthesis of hoser and bogan; indeed, possibly the creation of a new subspecies of easy livers: the Great Northern Ontario She-Bogan.

I'll let you know how my classy new lifestyle goes.

Air Canada next time, perhaps

I've been kayaking rather than blogging since getting to North Bay, but this morning I'm respecting my aching muscles and taking a little break. I could chill your blood with photos of my legs and the revolting farm of mosquito and blackfly bites bursting out of the skin there but tonnes of other disgusting things are happening in the world, so why subject you to mine . . . and I'm trying to be stoic and take it as preparation for moving to a country where everything bites.

Just to say that on the plane ride over, the only movies on offer were Hannah Montana: The Movie and Seventeen Again. I watched both. And Air France, you fucking cunt, you have sooooo lost this customer. The only reason I flew on your craptacular aeroplanes that keep crashing and put up with your stewardesses' shitful behaviour and consistently and obligingly changed seats on every flight I've flown with you in the last five years as your agents are too fucking retarded to book families seats together is because you have seatback movie screens with a wide selection, not so that I can fucking sit there and watch a generation of young girls educated to have the most fuckwitted and unrealistic priorities in the history of society by an underaged, overprivileged celebrity daughter lipsynching, poncing around on a horse and 'scoring' with sexless blond adolescent cowboys who don't try to get into her fucking pants, or by an unthreatening, dancing, selectively waxed male model educating a highschool using his 'hotness' into believing that sex is only for making baby daughters and yet a boy getting onto the basketball team is a sign that you should nail him.

What fucking element of my painstakingly compiled customer profile, the one that makes you spam me up the douchehole, encouraged you to think this was a good fucking idea? Fuck you, you fucking fuckers. Air Fucking France indeed. It's all in the name, isn't it? God I hate the French. BTW, I used to, uhm, "try to make baby daughters" with a guy who looked like Zac Efron and he was the filthiest pervert I've ever given an opportunity to express himself. A propos of nothing. Just good memories.

I also believe in communication

Our company, I may have suggested some posts back, is having some issues, whose seriousness or lack thereof I’ll decline to comment on specifically; it’s way outside of my knowledge. But what has been interesting is the flurry of communications and meetings and reassurances and invitations for questioning from management, which yesterday annoyed me a little more than they ordinarily would because of our mag’s deadline and my squandering of time this past little while, when I’ve been dreaming of cottages and family and rural outdoor living and any number of things, actually, that aren’t the dramatically listing and tanking industries I’m being paid to study.

So as I was sitting there being annoyed in a (lunchtime, with no food) please-don't-do-what-all-those-guys-just-did meeting, I suddenly hit on a cure for being annoyed in such situations; playing mental spin the bottle for all the other people in the room. Randomly choosing two meeting participants and imagining what they’d look and sound like getting ridiculously into each other – erupting across the table holding raging boners or erupting out of their clothes. It was so awesome I had to keep struggling not to burst into hoots of uncontrollable laughter - no judgement on my colleagues’ humour value as sexual beings but you do get some frightfully unlikely combinations in there – and before I knew it the meeting was finished and I was in a good mood. The only lingering annoyance is not having thought of the measure years before to make conferences, lectures, and church services move along faster.

And if you hadn’t thought of it either, dear reader, there it is – my gift to you.

Whaaaaaa?tsing Matilda

Strange to have two Daddy-age Australian men who have never been to Europe before staying with us.

They're both terrific, much to my relief; that nervousness I wrote about just got nervouser as yesterday wore on, evolving into stomach-churning at the aeroport. But they're quite disarming and the F-word's dad has already touched my heart by reminding me of my dad, which is a touch incestuous in its implications, though nowhere near as bad as a friend's girlfriend who keeps insisting the F-word looks like Adriano Celentano, and he doesn't, right, because Elvis looks like Adriano Celentano, and I'm not boinking my brother. Stupid woman.

Anyways, it's strange to have the Australians staying with us because it's strange to be imagining what Europe looks like in their eyes - it's an experience of Europe that's completely outside of my experience, since my parents did most of their growing up here. It's also strange to realize how far the F-word is compensating for his natural accent when he speaks to me and most other people; I've already noticed he sounds different when he's phoning home, but now that I'm listening to non-expat Australians talk I realize I only understand 85% of what they're talking about.

There will be a learning curve even in moving back to Anglophonia, it seems.

That pasta gave me herpes

So the F-word’s dad is arriving this evening, and I believe I mentioned on Friday I was a bit nervous. Last night I was boiling some pasta, some darling little witches’ hats the F-word constructed that are so good at scooping up a light brothy sauce, and forgot their efficient cupping action whilst trying to eat one to see if it was cooked. The boiling water therein dinged my lower lip, hurting like hell and now – well, it doesn’t hurt anymore, but there’s a small blister, which makes me look like I’ve got a herpes sore.

There are a few achievements in my life that I’m really proud of. One is grad school, another is functional polyglottism, and the third is having made it through three decades and vast tracts of men without getting herpes. And now the F-word’s father is visiting, and he’s going to see this little blister on my lip, and he’s not going to know who awesomely, incredibly herpes-free I am.

C’est la vie.

The Red Dragon is incapacitated

Ugh. Drunk too much crappy wine last night, headachey this morning, and going to Canada in a week, exactly. Awesome, but shit. I have to . . . do . . . stuff. I haven't even thought through what I fucking need to do yet . . . let people there know, I guess . . . and the F-word's dad gets here Monday, and I haven't met a boyf's parents since 2002, and I'm not quite sure - possibly I'm nervous.

The good news is that the F-word has found my camera cable and I can put pictures on this blog again. Since I'm in a touch of a panic - no, I'd say more a touch of an anxiety - by testament of feeling like having a headache this morning is throwing some massive wrench into the delicate process of getting me safely to Canada next Friday, let's put up something lovely and calm - the Michaelangelo that makes going to Bruges the way I do everytime anyone comes to visit (thank god, I'll have left for Canada before the F-word takes his dad there, because I think I've been there six fucking times in two fucking years) fairly worthwhile:

Mary and child, Bruges
Originally uploaded by Mistress La Spliffe

I could stare at her for ages, and have . . . it's my favourite representation of Mary, and while I've read commentaries saying it's compositionally remarkable for how sad Mary looks, how 'distant' from her son, and how Jeebus is about to rush out to his cruel but heroic destiny in the world, for me the remarkable thing about this statue (and the Pieta, bizarrely) is how infant-motherly Mary looks - that sort of pre-occupied, hasn't-slept-enough-for-months look, but at the same time, how tender, how protective, and still how nurturing - one arm steadying her kid, the other poised at the ready in case he tumbles, but letting him move around; you have to, and anyways, you can tell looking at the kid he'll be a whiner if he isn't allowed to.

I've seen this woman and her kid hundreds of times in waiting rooms. Which is what makes Christianity Christian, I suppose.

Say what to who, buddy?

This post is about work, so it will be brief, and vague.

With the past 12 months, a couple of dozen people have been sacked. Unimportant people. Single mums and all that. And then within the past week, half a dozen more have quit. Important dudes. All of a sudden. Together. If you know what I mean. Not completely important people, in fact the sector they were working on is not exactly our money-tree and I’ll be shocked if it is for them in the present economic climate. But there you are.

Now our CEO is sending us angry daily emails about how this doesn’t mean the company is going under. Fair enough. He has also sent an email to all of our clients, including the ones who are in no way involved with the non-money-tree that has just walked off the job, assuring them of the same thing.

I don’t know what the case is and I wasn’t thinking at all (or not much) about our company going under until he started sending daily emails about it. But what is pissing me off so badly now is that I’m SURE that very few of the clients purchasing my products would give a flying fuck about the non-money-tree on a different continent that has just walked off the job, and nonetheless they’ve got a strange message from our CEO in their inbox about how my company isn’t going under, when maybe they weren’t thinking about it at all.

So I’m not sure about some of what’s going on, and I’m pissed off about what I know is going on. This is what happens when you let men out of the battery farm and into the CEO seat, it’s like constrant pre-menstrual syndrome with a fucking megaphone.

UPDATE

Keeping this online as testament to my wrongness. I approached the CEO to ask him to clarify what exactly he'd done, and he explained he'd only sent the external letter to staff and the clients using this particular money-tree - not everybody, as I'd assumed when it showed up in my inbox without explanation. Obviously I still think he needs to calm down in terms of his staff emails but he's definitely not ready to be sent back to the battery farm yet. My abstract apologies for the abstract criticism he will never, ever read. One hopes.

Lusitanian English Television Bodice Ripping Craptacular

So a fun thing about Portugal is that almost everyone we bumped into, city and country, spoke at least a smattering - usually more - of French or English, so we weren't at a loss to communicate and indeed to have good fun. And as in Spain, in those situations where they didn't, an awkward but clear conversation could be had by speaking sloooooowly in Italian and listening to them respond sloooowly in Portuguese. But usually they were polyglots and while that has a lot to do with tonnes of them going off to France to work, I think at least on the English side (considering how much complaining I've heard about the Portuguese school system) that has a lot to do with their television being subtitled instead of dubbed (unlike France, Italy, and Spain, where people are absolutely crap at English in comparison).

And a fun thing about that is that we got to see television we'd never seen before. Not much of it because we were so excited about being somewhere it wasn't raining, and there were so many summer festivals, that we were outside most of the time. But a good bit. The upshot is that I saw three new shows I'd only heard of before, and liked one of them:

1. 30 Rock. This was the one I liked. It's no Arrested Development but worth the price of admission for revealing that Alec Baldwin, like Nick Cage, should never have ever pretended to be a dramatic actor, ever, and just concentrated on being funny. Good strong ensemble and Jane Krakowski used to much less annoying effect than in Ally McPuke; laughed out loud and made a conscious effort to watch it a second time (Portugal, like a sensible county, airs TV episodes on consecutive days rather than consecutive weeks so one doesn't stop caring in the interim) at which point I laughed out loud some more.

2. The Tudors. The worst thing in bodice-ripping historically tarty boring bullshit I have ever seen, and I've seen Elisa di Rivombroso. I can't think of a single excuse to watch this stinker except to marvel at how Jonathan Rhys-Myers' neck has ballooned out from the birdlike tininess of Velvet Goldmine, so that it looks like his head is sitting on top of an identically circumferenced tube. The kicker is - you know how I feel about Henry VIII. And I honestly believe there would be no better television than showing him for the monstrously fat, suppurating, revolting, ginger mess he was by the time Anne Boleyn started holding her nose and boffing him, and instead they've got the cute little brunet tart from Velvet Goldmine and inflated his neck. Snore. Snore. Snore.

3. Dexter. I had my doubts going in; it looked like a one-trick pony that had already collapsed in the saddle in the spate of copy-cat follow-ups to The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. It was far, far worse than I'd been expecting. The flat voice-over revealing everything going on in the protagonist's mind and the excessive use of flashbacks drained the events of the episode of any interest they might have had, and any incidental watchability went down the shitter through the excessively bad dialogue writing.

You know, I loved the first four seasons of The Sopranos, I loved the first season of Deadwood, I loved Oz flat-out, but those sorts of shows have a lot to answer for; after they took off as they did TV Land figured out that it didn't actually have to compete with that calibre of writing (indeed, the shows in question could rarely sustain it themselves); it could just show similar levels of titties and exceedingly macabre violence and filthy fucking language and neat camera angles, and people would still think it was cool. Okay. Scratch that. Those sorts of shows don't have a lot to answer for. Audiences have a lot to answer for. The Fucking Tudors, for fuck's sake. Just go download some fucking porn and see some actual penetration shots, and skip over the literary urination on the works of Shakespeare, Robert Bolt, and generations of engaging and competent historians. Fuck.

Houses built on sand

Amie had her baby a few days ago, Lady (who was married a few weeks ago in Benin) has got one in the oven, and I remain a fallow money-making machine. After Lady told me she's incubating, I had a biological moment wherein I was convinced I was the only one of my girlfriends who remained unreproduced, which was bizarre because after my brains snatched the reins back from my cunt, I realized that's not true at all - most of my girlfriends, the vast majority in fact, haven't. But it was a dizzy five minutes. A dizzy five minutes wherein, if our birth control apparati had been in front of me, I would have felt morally justified sabotaging it. Yeesh. Gross.

We've got a timeframe in mind - we've got an amount of money we need first in mind - and the bastard of it all is that 80% of me is convinced that all the money flooding in to bolster up the pillars of our ubiquitous decadent economic temple will result in the thousands of euros I'm so painfully socking away devaluing completely by the time I want to spend them. I'll tell you one thing, though - I'm glad they're euros. When you're sharing your currency with economic shitteries like Italy and Spain there are some major worries attached, but I'm 70% reassured by the fact that fiscal stability is basically written into the genes of the EU . . . the only way the euro will go to shit any faster than all the various dollars I care about is if the EU itself goes to shit. Of course it's a possibility but the awesome thing about Europe is the governing structures are too scared of their citizens to bugger their money. I hope.

I remain a worried, fallow money-making machine.