Not okay

Last night I hit the point of smoke re-uptake where I started writing poetry again. It was nice. I have to work hard at blocking out a million little voices though. Especially Virginia Woolf's from Orlando, talking about all those unwelcome s's.

If I was clever I'd start seeing a headshrinker here. The other night as I was walking home I saw a man who had been hit by a car on one of the main streets lying very still. I scuttled on as usual, not wanting to be one of those awful people who gawk, not wanting to risk getting in the way of emergency services, who were already there getting a stretcher ready. But as I was almost clear I heard a high-pitched thready wail that sounded like a child in trouble and I had to turn and look.

It was still a grown man lying very still. But for an awful moment I saw him as a child-that-was, and all of us as children-that-were - and my missing boss was quite childlike in some ways, so it was no problem to think of him that way, and it's been a combination that's been torturing me, actually, thinking of him as he could have been at the end, a scared child - and the panic that came out of that, a horrible feeling that one wants to leave behind with childhood - "oh shit, who's taking care of us all?" - was almost overwhelming. I hadn't had a panic attack in years and I wasn't about to start having them again next to a possibly fatal accident scene where the emergency services didn't require a distraction, so I breathed heavy and scurried back home.

But this is something that needs to be addressed. I've been in a constant state of low-key panic that bursts out periodically for weeks now every time someone I have regard for does anything a little bit risky - and I'm talking a little bit risky - works too hard, comes home too late, doesn't call at the exact time they usually do. It risks turning me into one of those worn-down women with only one mode. And just like Magnum PI, I know what you're thinking, but actually the smoke re-uptake is a coping mechanism. All this was worse before I started getting high every night again.

Sweethearts letting the world tick over nicely

So we had our group therapy session at work about my missing boss. I don't know how helpful it was, because as I've mentioned at length I'm still unwillingly exploring a rather unwelcome emotional landscape at the moment. But I was very touched that so many people were so concerned about me. Funny how gratifying that is. I guess my missing boss and I had been rather loud and laugh-y in our interactions over the past couple of years, by his standards anyways. It feels like a grain of comfort to think that perhaps the last couple of years of his life, the work part of it at least, were a little more loud and laugh-y for having known me. It would be payback. I'm a much better person for having known him.

The night previous a young South American intern who hadn't been able to make the session caught me when I was staying late, which I have to do fairly frequently in these turbulent days, and after we'd both had a few drinks in celebration of one of the Money Men going back to the CIS country he'd been born in some years previously. We'd always exchanged the proper pleasantries but now we talked. Well, mostly she did and I listened, once we finished talking about my boss, because she had rather a lot going on in good and bad ways, including being the daughter of one of the richer men in her country.

But at some point in the conversation I mentioned that once in awhile, I missed Kraft Dinner, and I hadn't actually eaten any in years and years. And yesterday morning, there as a box of it sitting on my desk. Isn't that sweet? But remind me the next time I have a tête-à-tête with an extremely rich person to mention that I miss $10,000 in small unmarked bills.

Tighty righty comedy gold

Australian opposition politics has gone apeshit over a proposed emissions trading scheme that the Labor party is shoehorning through for a vote before the Copenhagen conference. Tony Abbott is the new head of the Liberals, an anti-labor party who are in coalition with the Nationals, who used to advertise themselves as a force for Senatorial honesty, made a few compromises too many, and now advertise themselves as a bunch of morons who will bend over backwards to assure rural Australia that the country's environmental catastrophes have nothing to do with their ridiculously inefficient and consumptive farming practices.

Tony Abbott, a fuckwit anti-choice dried-out lizard carcass who can barely speak, replaces Malcolm Turnbull, who was one of my favorite right-wing politicians: he has principles, after a fashion, and is anti-monarchist (Abbott, on the other hand, compared Australians who wanted their own republic to 'stupid children blowing raspberries'), and did his best to try to kick his party into ratifying the ETS. Also Robert Hughes' nephew-in-law. Too clever by half - you can tell when he speaks. He argues well, but he argues like a lawyer, not like a demagogue, and that simply does not do on the right side of the life, when rallying your support means appealing to a pathological level of paranoia.

And one knows all this because Australia, unlike Canada and the States and the UK, makes their politicians have interviews with Kerry O'Brien instead of letting them have infrequent press conferences. Kerry O'Brien is really great. One of my favorite ways to unwind after a long hard day is to get stoned to the eyeballs and watch him make the leading politicians of his country go "errrrrrr . . .". He just asks the most inconvenient questions one could possibly ask. It's fantastic. The F-word gets a limited pleasure out of it because he points out the moments of clarity are few and far between - that as good an interviewer as Kerry O'Brien is, the person he's interviewing is merely a politician, and therefore still just trying to sell a turd with a birthday candle stuck in it, even if they do get stuck for answers occasionally. But I just find it so fucking gratifying, I can't even tell you.

Something else that helps me unwind after a long hard day is getting stoned to the eyeballs and watching Yes, Minister. It used to be Margaret Thatcher's favourite show, you know. I'm sure she's excellent company. Just like Satan would be, if Satan had a drink in his hand, his feet up on the ottoman and his full quota of ruined souls for the day.

Rotterdam mijn liefde

We just spent the weekend in Rotterdam - pictures to follow. For weeks all and sundry who were aware of our destination, which I chose to go to with some passion to celebrate my 31st birthday on the basis that passing through Rotterdam on our way to and from Amsterdam was driving me crazy because I wanted to get out and look at the beautiful modern buildings, warned us we were heading into a grey shithole that everybody hated.

Now it may be because I'm incurably contrarian, but having spent a couple of days there I have to say anybody who doesn't like Rotterdam is a fucking asshole. Rotterdam is fucking awesome, I've never seen anything like it. I could compare it to Dusseldorf or some other German city that got completely wrecked in the last world war and rebuilt in a reasonably interesting and livable way, but Rotterdam leaves them behind: Dusseldorf and similar German cities were rebuilt in a very reconstructive fashion, comparatively, with an eye to recreating past glories and conditions: but in Rotterdam, somehow the clipboards ended up in the hands of people who had decided they would do everything they could to make their City Mark Two very fucking human.

Of course they had the natural advantage of it being a port town full of canals and the river, so it's a very watery town, and that makes for a sort of default pleasure for the eye: I don't know about you but I find it pretty hard to maintain a bad mood when there are lots of boats and pretty diving birds all over the place. And then there's the typically brilliant Dutch organization of circulatory space: bike paths coupling and outnumbering roads, ubiquitous footpaths, roads all nicely arranged to keep the cars out of everybody else's way, and comprehensive public transport that we didn't bother to use because this was very much a walking weekend: outside of meals, drinking, a couple of pitstops at the quick serve windows of coffeeshops, and a long visit to the terrific Van Beuningen gallery, we spent the entire weekend looking around the city at the startling architecture.

Take the cube houses, for instance. The cube houses remind me of Venice or the Guell park in Barcelona because they're something that can't be appreciated until you're in them. When I saw the pictures I thought they were a rather neat if ugly idea, but I wasn't particularly excited to visit them. However, when we ended up there on our Rondje Rotterdam stroll, seeing the way they were arranged, took (or failed to take) up space, and where they were on the Oude Haven (where, when I'm a multi-millionaire, I will definitely be buying a pied a terre) - why, it was just fucking lovely.

And the relative goodness of the food, ready availability of kibbeling, the friendly student/multicultural vibe, the utter lack of American tourists pretending they were being dirty by getting high, and the exciting fact that it only rained for about 1/4 of the time we were circumnavigating the city (the sun actually came out twice) sealed the deal. Fuck, what a great town. I loved it so much that while we were there I actually got my first pangs of panic at the prospect of leaving Europe. I haven't fallen for a city so hard since Barcelona.

The only stomach ache is in my head

We're on our way to Rotterdam tonight. Thinking about all the lovely modern architecture we'll see there (only a 20 to 40% chance of precipitation over the weekend! No better touring weather in the Netherlands!) and all the reefer I'm a-gonna smoke is helping me in the leadup to our first office group therapy session about my missing boss. I don't know what it will be. The thing is I'm absolutely blind in this situation. You know the parable of the blind men and the elephant? That's how I feel at the moment about how I feel: like I'm touching a part of it, but I don't know what the rest of it is like, and honestly I don't know if I'm going to be as fine as you can be in this sort of situation, or if tomorrow I'll be ripping off my clothes and smearing turd on the walls of an opera house.

Well, it's not likely. Rotterdam doesn't have an opera house. And right now I'm just annoyed. Just a burbling feeling of annoyance. But not the normal, garden variety Mistress-La-Spliffe annoyance; instead it's the sort of annoyance which turns into a headache around the front part of your head. The sort of annoyance that feels like hate. Which is unhelpful.

Anyways. Onwards and upwards.

To: Mistress La Spliffe . . . . Love: Mistress La Spliffe

You should see the sky out there. It's a pale but electric fuchsia. The pollution here make for really great sunsets and really great sunrises, but this is the sort of sunrise I imagine sailors curse at. Well, thank goodness I'm not a sailor. It's working, the trick of reminding myself that the sights I'm seeing now, I'm not likely to ever see in the same way again, because of our departure before the next time the seasons fully rotate. I'm enjoying it more here in general, and while it may be a bit of a stretch to say I'm enjoying what is extremely likely to be my final full northern European winter, I do hate it less than usual.

The word "final" is a little difficult today. Yesterday the Yankee manager, who is going about things very decently in view of my boss here going lost, more decently than you'd have expected from the mean way I wrote about him in the past when he did things I didn't like, called me up and asked me how I would feel about them beginning the search for the missing man's replacement. I said I saw the necessity of it, and he said he disliked the finality of the move, and then I made some reassuring sounds . . . but that word has been sticking with me. Finality; knowing things end. It's what makes a linear perception of human life and its phenomena piquant and bearable and at the same time utterly fucking miserable. Sort of like MSG.

Probably a cyclical view of time is a little more healthy. There's a certain irony in that, given the popularity of MSG in traditionally Buddhist countries. But I think I'm the only person in the world who appreciates the irony, given I'm the only person in the world who'd be ridiculous enough to compare mortality to MSG. Nonetheless, I do appreciate it awfully, so I shall give it to myself as a birthday present, not least because the first thing I saw clearly when I woke up this morning, automatically put on my glasses and stumbled around my apartment was my naked reflection in the bathroom mirror; and so the first semi-coherent thought I had on the morning my 31st birthday was "holy shit, that's a sweet piece of ass."

Deadlines and lifelines

I turn 31 tomorrow, and in a desperate race against the clock, today will see me call, chair, and boss my way through my first managerial meeting. I remember half my life ago, on the November 24th of me being 15, in a desperate race against the clock during those days of printer paper with wee holes in the side that kept jamming, I was printing out my first novel so I could say I'd finished writing my first novel when I was 15. I'm mildly perturbed today that by one practical measure I'm farther from my vocational dreams now than when I was 15. But what I wrote when I was 15 was utter balls and what I write now is much better, so I'm getting over it.

I've never felt less festive in a birthday sense, and that includes the years I spent in a very real and pressing depression. I'm not depressed at the moment. It's odd, all these emotional discoveries one makes when this are all fucked. I'm dangerously overworked, stressed, grieving and yet sort of basculated because we still don't have a body and I still expect him to walk into the office at any moment, and certainly my SAD is giving my brain some good sharp kicks, but even though I'd say things are a right shittery at the moment I know I'm not depressed. I'm still showering, for one. That's a bit of a giveaway that my depressive centres aren't acting up too much.

All the same I'm finding it a little bit difficult to give a fuck about my birthday. And that's partly because it falls on Wednesday, which is deadline day, so if I manage to get out of the office before 19h, then that will be a minor fucking miracle. For someone who isn't depressed I certainly complain a lot, don't I? But that's another bit of a giveaway my depressive centres aren't acting up too much.

All the same I shudder to think what sort of state I'd be in with the F-word. In fact I don't want to think about it because I don't want to know how dependent I am on his awesome. I'd rather just focus on his awesome.

Last Night's movie

In the spirit of all the apocalypse that's been floating around here, but actually mostly because of peer pressure, I went to see 2012 yesterday. I either have a great deal to say about it, or very little, and since my boss has disappeared we are so fucking swamped with work that I'll go for the "very little" option.

1. The car chase was sweet. If the whole movie had been that car chase, and if I'd been allowed to smoke weed in the theatre so that I was still buzzing after the car chase, the movie would have been roughly 100 times better.

2. Most of the rest of the movie was so bad that I spent it mentally comparing it with Canada's own sun-sparked apocalypse effort from a few years back, that helped launch the lovely and talented Sandra Oh to the dizzying pinnacles of becoming a Grey's Anatomy Regular, which by my calculations makes her the most famous entertainer of Korean descent known in the Anglophone world, or at least second between Kim Jong Il and Margaret Cho - the altogether tolerable Last Night

3. The erstaz Russian, Johann Urb, was a peice of super-ass. Whenever my mind wandered from comparing 2012 to Last Night in a microcosmic mental experiment to work out the fundamental difference between Americans and Canadians, it moseyed over to getting a damn good spanking from that. He looked like a Sean Bean that doesn't punch people for fun.

4. I discovered the reason John Cusack is such an engaging actor; he plays his characters so that you know, after they kiss the girl, that their cock has gone chubby. Funny how most American actors fail to communicate that fundament of a good, satisfying, emotionally charged kiss so spectacularly. When my mind wasn't fixed on the cinematic symptoms of the difference between Americans and Canadians or on getting a damn good spanking from an ersatz Russian pretty boy, it was wondering if the vast majority of American actors are gynophobes, gay, chronically impotent or just utterly bereft of any fucking dramatic talent whatsoever.

My birthday is coming up, and to celebrate Roman Polanski now being in prison awaiting some sort of evaluation of his case for longer than the big bad old 48 day sentence he ran away from in the 1970's, and with no immediate prospect of release, I'd like to post Chris Rock being Chris Rock, that is, awesome.

I heart DILFs

You may have gathered by now that I'm not Brussels' biggest fan, indeed that I'm counting the days, but nonetheless there are some really great things about it, and now that I'm back to being only seasonally depressed and not quite so gutted about the tragedy at work - amazing how one just gets used to things being totally fucked - I'm able to appreciate it more. Some of these things are tied to what we spent the weekend enjoying, ie culture, which all and sundry are warning me Australia is utterly bereft of so I should get it while I can. Fair enough.

Another thing about Brussels, indeed most of northern Belgium which is pretty sweet is the DILF population. I'm not very well positioned to enjoy it as I'm in a satisfying long term monogamous relationship with the man who I'd call my soulmate if I was the sort of fucking wet who believed in soulmates. But as the bishop said to the vicar, no one has poked my eyes out, and all the hot young men with babies is a sight to soothe their soreness.

I don't know if it's the excellent creche system or the comprehensive social security at large or just if these people aren't very handy with the condoms, but damn, there are some hot young professional motherfuckers who look like Ken Dolls except you can tell are swinging some serious pipe by the knowing way they smile at you, and who you can tell have pipes that work by the legions of little poppets hanging off their arms and being pushed around in prams. Too bad they're all blond. Blond men in general just look sort of imaginary in an unattractive way to me. Having boffed a couple I can say I really dislike getting them naked and looking at the startling lack of contrast between their skin and their hair. It's alllllmost gross. At least redheads have comic value.

Orientalism rising

Besides making it to the concert last weekend we went to one of the attractions at the Europalia festival, which this year has as its theme China. Synchronously this is the first week I'm editing the Asian magazine solo, and I'm realizing in a whole new and much more concrete way that I don't know shit about Asia. And from the magazine's perspective, while China isn't Asia, it's 80% of Asia. At the moment that's far more interesting and exciting than intimidating; working in a town like Brussels while I edit features on China is a very gentle introduction to something I don't know shit about.

Anyways. As mentioned, that is happening at the same time as the Europalia festival, which is about China, as stated, and this past weekend we went to see a photo and architecture exhibition. A few weeks back we'd already seen the Son of Heaven exhibition, which was neat, I guess, especially the jade burial suit, but where I learned that I've stopped giving a shit about ruling class lifestyles and objets d'art in an internationalist context, not just a European one.

I enjoyed the photo and architecture exhibits a great deal more, because sometimes it seemed like I was looking at things that came from somewhere else entirely somehow. And the F-word and I found a place we will have to visit, as photographed by Ruan Xiarong - Gulangyu Island, where in the ultimate in urban decay there are trees growing out of old Victorian embassies, and which apparently has the highest number of pianos per capita in the world.

My lovely horse, you're a pony no more

On Friday I felt like ass on a plate, or as the French say, 'une assiette'. Both physically and mentally. It's cold season, which explains the physicality, and mentally - well, of course it's my boss. I sort of swing between missing him and realizing for the first time what a shithole the world can be sometimes.

Nonetheless that night I dragged myself to a concert with the F-word and some of his friends: this one. And it was lovely, and I don't think anything else could have reached me properly that evening, since when I've been feeling substantially better. Julia Charkova of Khakassia - her instrument and her nasal tuneful singing - was very lovely and sent my brain off thinking about Mongols and what they've done to music as well as the map of Asia.

And then Albina Degtyareva of the Sakha republic was incredible. I read the programme, I knew she's been to university to put as all in a shamanistic state of mind, but it put me in mind of some militant First Nations guys who used to live around my hometown, who were anxious to recover their culture and willing to do so through the medium of dreams and meditation in the cases where us fishbellies had successfully expunged the record. But in Sakha I guess the degree of isolation was so huge that even the Russian Orthodox Church is calling them syncretic, and going to one of the republic's university's is a way of dreaming or meditating . . . I don't know. It gave me a powerful urge to go there, though.

And she was incredible, it was really incredible, what can I say? It took me outside of myself at a time I really needed to be taken outside of myself. Like a Jehovah's Witness knocked on my door right after my dog died. I'm grateful I just had some quick shamanistic exposure on Friday instead of bumping into any religions that would require me to stop boffing the F-word extramaritally, now that I think about it.

Here she is with her old band:



Here's another with more giumbarde - sorry, just can't bring myself to call it a jew's harp - except I guess I just did.

Sin before suffering

Wrapping up the Jarrett. I've never read a book like it and the further I get into it the more bizarre it becomes. I don't know where its academic utility would be exactly - perhaps not for history; more, I think, for training people in how to be literary critics or commentators or psychoanalysts, which I think was his idea too, to some extent. I do know that I would love to write books in this one's style, but I don't have the general knowledge, or the in-depth understanding of a given era.

A history of the imagination, it calls itself, from Victoria's accession to World War One; a history of the more changeable bits of collective thinking that seem so immutable when you're the one thinking them. A self-confessedly Jungian history, with an unexpectedly dramatic tone - almost something serialized about they way he organizes it, the way Conan Doyle and Victoria and Gladstone and Disraeli pop in and out of focus . . .

The other night I was struck by an account from the "Watchers upon the high towers" chapter, which is full of apocalypse. Many people before 1881 thought the world would end that year, and many people after 1881 thought the world had ended - that they were now in post-Rapture chaos or the reign of Christ on earth (I can never keep all those Christian stories straight). Jarrett mentions one extremely popular lecturer and author, Josiah Strong, who I'd never heard of before, who believed that the Christians of the United States had it in their power:

". . . during the next ten or fifteen years to hasten or retard the coming of Christ's kingdom in the world by hundreds, or perhaps thousands of years." But first they must stop letting members of inferior races into America, since only the Anglo-Saxons were "exponents of a pure spiritual Christianity". Then they must steer clear of idleness, atheism, popery, alcohol and above all socialism, "which attempts to solve the problem of suffering without eliminating the factor of sin". . . the Librarian of Congress later said the book had an impct second only to Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Looking into this sort of thing strikes me as incredibly important, and incredibly underdone in terms of how history is presented to dilettantes like myself at least. . . the beginnings of ideas, the emotional bases of what we're convinced is our rationalism, seem to me like one of the most important things you could know about history. Socialism isn't just a problem because the rich have to sacrifice some of their wealth, it's an emotional problem because you don't know that the people it benefits have done anything to deserve that we attempt to relieve their suffering - there's a moral angle to the history of the massive resistance to socialism in the United States that needs to be understood, if not admired . . .

World's cutest degenerates

There are lots of benefits to having an Australian boyfriend. One of them is the unfailing funniness of the way he says words like "beer" and "groin" and "shit" - despite his years and years of living abroad and modulating his accent to be comprehensible to Europeans and Canadians, some words, like the three just listed, are said with multiple syllables and vowel sounds that just don't exist in any other mouths I've ever experienced, and it's hilarious. "Beeeeeiiiyaah." Marvellous. (He laughs at the way I say "gazebo", "granola" and "coffee" so it's allowed.)

Another is that being excessively fond of him has made me more interested in the country he comes from, which is interesting in its own right due the bizarre flora and fauna. Take koalas. They're fucking adorable, right? Look at this fucking adorable koala:

Until the F-word started dominating my consciousness I was content to leave it at that - "aw, koalas, adorable" and move my brain along to the next task at hand. But do you know what else about koalas? They're the fucking dregs of society in the classic Daily Mail sense. They spend all day sleeping, getting stoned out of their minds on psychotropic leaves, once in awhile managing to lazily fuck each other without either protection or discretion, and spreading the clap across their population like wildfire. Lazy, venereal disease-ridden junkies. Marvellous. Except it's killing them. And the government isn't going to take it anymore. No special treatment for those nasty little things. Just because everyone adores them doesn't mean they can be filthy decadent hophead sluts and expect the rest of us to clean up after them.

Poor koalas. I still love them.

Well. A nasty little entry about the world's cutest animals dying of the clap was my attempt at an fluffy escape from blogging about how fucked up everything is. Some of you have been sweet enough to worry about me. I'm actually okay, I think - not to worry, at least. We're getting counselling at the office, I have fantastic support from my koala-loving partner, I've been super-touched to have your sweet messages, and this is Belgium, not North America; I can go on stress leave if I need to, and I will if I need to, but right now I don't.

I don't know if it's as morbid as all hell or not, but I worked out that around the time my colleague disappeared, I had this song in my head, and listening to it once every morning, as I'm blogging and getting ready for work, is somehow a massive comfort:



Soon I'll be ready to start thinking about things like the long-term philosophical view about souls over bodies, which gentle Rodelinda, with great emotional delicacy, suggested suggesting. Not yet though. Right now I'll just keep listening to the Final Fantasy song that was stuck in my head when he disappeared, morbid as hell or not.

Four escape routes

Speaking of escaping into books during a time of fuckery: the bookshop across from my favourite grocery store where I picked up Decline and Fall as soon as finishing Brideshead Revisited is fucking ace. This weekend I got quite a haul besides the Waugh:

Goodbye to All That - sqeeeeeee! Robert Graves is awesome on a stick. No wonder Ava Gardner hit that when it was already old enough to break. And there's so much more of him to read as I've only had the awesomeness of I, Claudius/Claudius the God and his Greek Myths. Both are really really worth reading no matter what sort of relationship you think you have with classical studies, and the Greek Myths is earth-shaking, as far as I'm concerned anyways. Each chapter tells the myth in a way directly drawn and referenced from a range of source texts, and, following the references, gets re-interpreted Gravesianly - through the lense of murderous fertility cults, matriarchies, and hallucinogenic mushrooms. And he is just the silkiest, friendliest writer - a real sort of formality to his phrasing which is nonetheless inviting, engaging - a nice big wingback easy chair; imposing, but upholstered with comfy velvet instead of patrician oxblood leather.

Mummy won it as a school prize some decades ago and it was sitting on my grandparent's bookshelves when I was a bored 13-year-old; one thing led to another, and, well, I don't think there's a single work that's had more of an influence on my symbolic or metaphorical thinking than that one, for better or worse. I didn't buy into it but I swallowed it whole, if you can see the difference. Part of my brain forever.

Grapes of Wrath - for the F-word. He hasn't read it yet. Enough said.

Far From the Madding Crowd - someone told me that this was the least depressing of Thomas Hardy's books and that it was even more or less funny. Well, I'll believe it when I read it. Personally I didn't think the Mayor of Casterbridge was depressing, I thought it was just awesome. Okay, the will at the end from the guy as read by his !!!SPOILER ALERT!!!! pseudo-daughter was tragic - it was a tragic book - but depressing? Anyways. I'm nonetheless curious about Far From the Madding Crowd. And I'm running out of Hardys that I'm willing to read. Tess of the D'Ubervilles - I gave up on that one halfway when I fully realized what a downer that was going to be - and Jude the Obscure - uhm, no. I've heard too much about it.

Murder on the Orient Express - it's a Poirot novel so I was hoping it'd help with my perceptions of Belgian retardation. It didn't. But I enjoy the language - already archaic - it happens so fast! Pukka sahib indeed.

Some histories need to end

Brideshead Revisited, ugh, a nasty little book about horribly nasty people, but such a good read that almost immediately upon finishing I bought Decline and Fall from a lovely new used bookshop that just opened across from my favourite grocery store.

Waugh provides a ghastly cure for anybody who fears that they're finding Graham Greene's bleak and gruelling vision of British Catholic duty has anything convincingly heroic to it outside of the Graham Greeniverse. Mind you I liked it very much, if not as much as the Graham Greeniverse, upon accepting the world of the novel for what it was . . . a place populated by the sort of people Monty Python made fun of, the End of Old Money History.

BTW, the End of History is such an interesting idea, isn't it? You'd think Fukuyama et al would have hestitated a bit more before proclaiming it considering the consistency to which it's been proclaimed over a history of our race and planet which, whatever else you'd like to say about it, certainly hasn't ended yet. As a matter of fact, offhand I have to say they way people Keep! Reporting! The END!!!!!! Of History!!!!! is one of the best advertisements I can think of offhand for postmodern historiography.

People are attached to their world view, to their own lifespan, to the extent that generation after generation can proclaim the End of History with amazing regularity, and re-arrange history to argue that it has led up inexorably to that End Point. I think it's probably a fairly natural instinct, as far as anything we've had an instinct to do since we started wearing clothes is 'natural', but I also think that inclination is a damn good reason to bend yourself into pretzels in the effort to take an objective, distrustful view of history. And people who say otherwise smell bad. But I digress.

Brideshead Revisited, grim, awfully grim. Not utterly without humour though. It is so nice to escape into books these days. Everything continues fucked, as you can imagine.

Processing revisited

I'm backing far, far up from this search. Last night it hit a level of wierdness beyond my comprehension, I mean super-uber-ultra beyond my comprehension, and that when my comprehension had already been baffled beyond its limits. I spent an hour sitting on the couch, watching the F-word shopping for a new harmonica on German websites, with my mouth hanging open, just trying to process. I haven't gone into that mode in years. In justice to myself I was really high at the time. But still. There's nothing I can do besides pick up his mail, hold everybody else's hand, and wait.

I will say this though: I've got more hope now than I've had in more than a week. In my head, the two likeliest things that could have happened to him were accident or running away, and I always dismissed running away because I couldn't imagine what he'd be running away from, and now I can.

In other news, reading Brideshead Revisited and getting an interesting sense of how the other half lived and thought. That it was didn't get obvious until Charles Ryder went back to England from France when he thought he was being morally called upon to beat up the proletariat. Smashing book so far.

Know when to fold them

Yesterday I did the only thing I could think of to do; I dumped the problem I was having with his family on four other people who loved my missing colleague more than I did. Three of them agreed with me and are taking over where I folded. One flipped out, got really offensive, and, well, I won't have to worry about choosing out Christmas presents for her anymore. What the fuck is wrong with Americans, anyways? She's the same person who calmy explained to me once why it was right Hillary Clinton didn't dump her husband when he stuck that cigar up the intern (because she's a politician, and she knew that people would never elect a divorced person to be president, because divorcées couldn't possibly keep the country in order if they couldn't keep their own marriage in order, and yes, Mistress La Spliffe, that makes perfect sense.) I keep discovering new and unsettling veins of weirdness and conventionality in those people.

Last word on this aspect of the subject:

Bigotry isn't just things you yell at wops, krauts, insert derogatory ethnicity/sexuality/visible denomination here, etc, on the street when you're fucking insane. It can also mean not informing the investigating authorities of someone's woppitude, krautdom, insert derogatory ethnicity/sexuality/visible denomination here etc. when they go missing in Central America on vacation, you suspect foul play, he hasn't been robbed, his woppitude, krautdom, insert derogatory ethnicity/sexuality/visible denomination here, etc., may have left him vulnerable to foul play, and, erm, he hasn't yet told his parents about the woppitude, krautdom, insert derogatory ethnicity/sexuality/visible denomination here, etc.

It can mean prioritizing the sensibilities of family or friends as concerns the woppitude, krautdom, insert derogatory ethnicity/sexuality/visible denomination here, etc. over exhausting every possible (indeed, in the circumstances, reasonably probable) avenue of inquiry as to the fate of said wop/kraut, insert derogatory ethnicity/sexuality/visible denomination here, etc.

I haven't stopped feeling like being sick. But at least I've made it other peoples' problem now to decide about going over the family's head, instead of mine - dumped it on the consciences of consciousnesses more wrapped up in this than I am. And in the process, I also feel like I flushed a bitch out of the closet, although probably in a few weeks or months or years I'll calm down and start missing her salty company. That's fucking DELEGATION, baby, it's awesome. No wonder U2 wrote a song about it. At least I think that's what those micks were yowling about.

But fuck, I miss him so.

Must actually get around to watching that 1996 Mike Leigh film with the great title

Oh readers, my heart is breaking. You know how pissy I get every time something I think is stupid is said or done, which makes me pretty pissy most of the time. But this is the first time I've had to watch stupid erase all my hope that someone I love is still alive.

I know it looks like fun, kids, but stupid KILLS.

I don't know how I get over this or move past this or anything. This is a grief I can't see the other side of. When people who I love died in the past, there were so many differences. I was prepared for it in a sense, but more importantly so were they. In at least two instances they waited patiently for their family's permission to let go and die. And we could all celebrate their lives and reflect on the great good they'd given us together, and we could all say "there was no stone left unturned in our love for them, we all did everything we could and loved them as well as we could."

But now . . . no. Not only the pain of the manner of his death - which is still a matter of some speculation - but of feeling that no, not everything was done. That some things that don't matter a good goddamn in Mistress La Spliffe Land mattered more than this man's life in the Land of His Family. And the horrible, wormy thought that I don't believe myself but which is nonetheless damaging my own conscience like fucking termites: what if he is alive and is waiting for help in the circumstances that I fear?

No, I don't see the other side of this. I don't see any lessons coming out of it. I don't see a single fucking speck of good or celebration or anything that isn't pure fucking never-ending suck, and I'm so sad and I miss him so much that I don't even have the energy to find refuge in pissiness anymore.

Some of you Blogrollers have families that seem like more of a curse than a blessing, and I've read and I've sympathized but I haven't understood for shit. What sort of sheltered existence have I led that this is the first time I've looked at a man's family and understood that concept as a reality? Is this a lack of emotional understanding on my part? Is it the case that many families are like this - just ticking along with all their secrets and lies, and then choking on those secrets and lies in a crisis?

Maybe that's the only good that can come out of this as far as I'm concerned - I always thought secrets and lies should be kept to the bare minimum but perhaps this was the practical demonstration I needed to make sure to stick to that once I start pumping out the kiddies. I guess we'll never fucking know.

Angry grief - Griefgry? Quite griefgry today

The search for my missing colleague is getting dumber and dumber. Really terrific media exposure now . . . I guess that's what happens when you're a missing journalist. And that's great. But . . . gah. I wish the family would try being completely forthcoming with the police before thinking about bringing in a psychic, let me put it like that.

The emotions are rather dreadful - sort of cyclical around the central theme of "I Miss Him" - because this was a man who managed not to annoy me once in two and a half years, and I get fucking annoyed by everything, and he was sweet, funny, warm, seemingly soft but he could stand up for himself, and us, in a professional context, and I miss him, he was such good company. And then swirling around that is "We're All Going to Be Fucked Getting Our Magazine Out", "His Family Is Doing It Wrong", "Why Is Everybody Treating the Locals Like Incompetent Spics When They're the Ones Doing It Wrong", "I Hope It Happened So Fast He Didn't Even Notice", "I Must Try to Hope He's Alive Or It's Bad Luck Somehow", ad nauseum, ad nauseum.

What I have found, bizarrely, is that it really helps to laugh, so much so that I'm starting to think the tragic history of the Jews, on my mind at the moment after knocking off Daniel Deronda, is part of what makes them so fucking funny, which they weren't in Daniel Deronda but oh well. You'd think Poles would be a bit more of a laugh riot in that case, though - maybe they are and the problem is just that I don't speak Polish. Anyways. Here's something that helped.

The driest argument has its hallucinations

My colleague is still missing in Central America. His family has taken an us vs. them mentality with the police that has become factually obstructive. I think he's probably dead but if he isn't, I can't think of anything much less useful than that. But you know what, he's my colleague, not my brother, and if they want to be assholes about it, there's not much I can do besides fucking weep and flag to the authorities that I'll be forthcoming as I can if they question friends and extended family. They probably won't. I hope they don't. I know what I think is right but at the same time I don't like the image of myself colluding with a Central American police force against a grieving family, which is how it will be perceived by said family and by that part of my brain which is all "fuck the po-po".

Part of what is distressing in these situations, I've discovered, beyond the horrible grief and the gnawing worry and the absolute lack of control and other people, is one's own brain.

Other than that, I'm on the home stretch with Daniel Deronda. Still ripping and not a single disappointment so far, beyond the let-down of Mordecai's big life-vision that he needed to share and bequeath to Daniel being Zionism. That was probably more earth-shaking at the time that Eliot was writing but I felt a bit let down. I was hoping for unicorns, or some magical mystery truth of some sort. Oh well.

The Red Dragon tells a non-PC parable

Last night the F-word had a friend over for dinner and to take my mind off of the monstrous situation at work, I decided to make us some muffins a little late in the evening. So off to the small Turkish shop at the top of the kitty corner street.

A little background. Halfway up the kitty corner street, there's a residence for retarded adults. Sorry if 'retarded' is a bad word now wherever you live. The residents have a spectrum of conditions - a few people with Downs' and lots of others with problems that are quite physically obvious but not quite so obviously diagnosable during a casual stroll down the street. The one unifiying factor, as far as I can tell, is that they're all dealing with physically obvious brain problems.

One of them, an older lady wearing pyjamas and drooling ever so slightly, pushed into the store in front of me muttering a bit. She zipped off to the soda section, carefully counted out four large bottles of Fanta, and zipped up to the single cash register, pushing in front of the small line that had formed there, to pay with the exact change that she was clutching. All of this was fine with me despite me, at that point, standing in said line, indeed being the next person in it that was pushed to one side. Good for her, I thought. She's on a mission for the Fanta and she's carrying it out. Everybody's relying on her and she's coming through for them. It reminded me of my maiden solo drive to the beer store in Canada a few months ago, when I had parked like a retard, so preoccupied was I with safely getting the plank of Molson back to Magnum and his buddies.

What wasn't so fine with me is that seconds after she pushed up to the cash, a second line suddenly materialized behind her. In fact I even think a couple of people lining up in my queue dropped out of it to queue behind her. She even had to push past them on her way out of the shop with the precious Fanta.

Now, there was little enough practical annoyance for me in this. I'm half guinea, I've spent years of my life in the rudest cities in Italy, the fucking international capital of illicit line-cutting, and I've done years of jeet kune do; nobody buds in front of me without my fucking consent, and I simply manouvered my elbow in front of the solar plexus of the man who'd started the second queue to hand my money to the rather bemused cashier.

But as I walked home afterwards it dawned on me: that was Belgium. That was a parable of what Belgium is. Belgium is a place where people will queue up behind a retarded lady who's drooling a little bit who pushes her way past an existing queue to pay for four large bottles of Fanta with exact change if they think it will shave 30 fucking seconds off their trip to the corner store, and then they'll act surprised and wounded when you gently but firmly elbow them in the gut to get them out of your way.

This is a very silly place.

The Red Dragon has a serious question . . .

Do you think Martin Amis ever gets tired of sucking? Or do you think he has any idea?

Jesus. At least that fucking blight on the face of the English-language 'literary' establishment is punching in his own weight class. His novels are to the contemporary canon what the words "healthful" and "orientate" are to the English language; ungainly, redundant, pretentious and lacking any excuse to exist. But to be fair, healthful and orientate's fathers weren't Kingsley Amis so it's more on their own merits I have to keep fucking seeing them in print.

The Red Dragon begs for help

Relative to my last post. We are having an emergency situation from work, and not in terms of deadlines but in terms of an actual emergency. In terms of life: one of my colleagues, who has gone missing whilst on vacation.

Rack your minds, pets, rack them hard, and if you can come up with any contact information for helpful businesses or organizations, or any advice pertinent to an Anglo going missing in Central America, please send to mllelaspliffe@gmail.com.

We are clutching at straws. Throw them if you can.

Concentrating on anger

Hey, you know what I've just figured out about the Kübler-Ross model? There are five stages of grief because the fifth stage is so shitty. Anger, denial and bargaining, especially, are way better than acceptance.

On the anger side of that equation, I may have an absolutely blood-chilling story of inselaffen bureaucratic Brazil-esque bloodymindedness, something beyond their normal such retardation altogether, something entering the realms of Eichmann herself, a picture perfect demonstration of the Banality of Evil. But I hope with all my heart I don't, because the man concerned, who would be the victim, is someone I and many other people hold very dear indeed. With all my heart, with all my heart, I hope all I have to tell you will be an absolutely blood-chilling story of inselaffen bureaucratic Brazil-esque bloodymindedness with the potential to have been a picture perfect demonstration of the Banality of Evil.

I do know this already though: if ever I get in trouble abroad, I would like you, please, to appeal to my beaver-beater embassies, not my fucking inselaffen embassies. Because put any fucking inselaffen into a public service and they become incompetent, responsibility-dodging fucktards and I hate them, I hate them, I hate them. They are like lobotomized Germans with no fucking zest for life and a fucking case of the paranoias. I hate the inselaffen administration so much. They cut corners here and there and still manage to devote more and more money to harassing their own citizens, and then when you need them the most they fuck you up the ass and apologize the whole fucking time they're doing it, but they don't stop, because inselaffen shitheels don't have any balls, and I hate them. Fuck, may they rot in a receptacle where where the stunted may become strong and the perverted be restored.

There's a massive fashion there of police blogging, by the way, in which dozens of anonymous cops with huge followings and, often, book deals, bitch about how the public hates them and the government keeps giving them dumb, unreasonable shit to do. Well, news flash, porkers: the two phenomena are not mutually independent. No matter how often you tell the public you're being put upon by the government, poor fucking you, it doesn't change the fact that that putting-uponness tells on the public, and while the government may be the asshole stepping on the public's neck, despite your whining you've chosen to become and remain the boot. Congratu-fucking-lations, everybody'll fucking love you now.

The first days of SAD

Ugh. SAD. Ugh. Stupid short days and painfully finite mortal lifetime. Ugh.

That having been said, I'm reading Daniel Deronda and it's fucking ace. Don't tell me how it ends, I like to not know that with George Eliot books. Love her writing so much - such characterization, such dialogue, combined with such an aesthetic sense - unique perhaps - that I'm starting to seriously question the hitherto fundamentally unquestioned superiority of my shmancy undergrad degree: why the fuck didn't we read any George Eliot? Maybe they did in the lit concentration. Anyways. Water under the bridge. I'm reading it now and it's good reading material for a thirty year old; perhaps I wouldn't have liked it in my late teens and infant twenties.

We watched The Caine Mutiny last night. Not a waste of time despite that sort of dated direction that patronizes the audience so awfully and makes American movies so distasteful, because Humphrey Bogart was impossible to stop looking at. Also Jose Ferrer, was, well, Jose Ferrer. I didn't think much of the script and even less of his speech at the end to the crew, but when he trotted out the line 'I'm a lot drunker than you are so it'll be a fair fight' it made the whole thing worth it. Most people would have made that line stupid. Not him.

No fat chicks, or meat

Last night Derek Jarrett introduced me to Frances Cobbe, who invented Freudianism long before Freud, equal in many details besides that of being ass-backwards, much more appealing and I suspect potentially a great deal more useful in terms of the treatment of mental disorders. But, you know, Frances being a chick, and a fairly fat chick at that, nobody cared and generations of men and women have been confidently informed they'd really like to fuck their parents if they could. You can read about it from here. I'm sick and working from home so no monster posting today.

Also last night I was already starting to feel like ass, but the F-word took me out for dinner just coz anyways to our favourite vegetarian place here, a little shopfront called L'Element Terre. Get it? Get it? Isn't it beautifully twee? Every time we go I think I'd like to open a restaurant just like it with the same name in the city we settle down in, but my guess is that if we do so in Australia we'll get gay-bashed. Anyways, it's Belgian vegetarian, which means lots of cheese and fish, I don't think there was more than three or four vegan options on the menu, but that's alright for us. For the second time - first was at the Berber place further up the same road - I had harira. Man, that is a fucking good soup concept. I think I'll make some today.

My one bitch was that everything, while delicious and made with obviously excellent ingredients - fresh, fresh, fresh - was fucking inundated with salt, just like it is at every veggie restaurant I ever go to. Why is that the choice - meat or salt? Why is the assumption that if you dump great big piles of salt into food people will forget they're not eating meat? And why is it important to forget you're not eating meat? Sigh. Oh well. I guess as far as humanitarian tragedies go it's no worse than everybody paying attention to a crackhead narcissicist like Freud instead of a fat chick who had all Freud's good ideas first and few of his bad ones.

I'll see you in a receptacle where the stunted may become strong and the perverted be restored, motherfucker

This account of metaphysical bureacracy and the defeat of Satan Himself in the highest court of English law is sourced from 'The New Harrowing of Hell' chapter from Derek Jarrett's The Sleep of Reason.

According to Anglican doctrine, hell froze over in 1864 and the Devil lost his groove in 1876. A couple of court cases did the trick, one of them featuring a priest who'd been a bit too nice in his thinking, and another featuring a man who wanted to take Communion despite his lack of belief in the Devil.

It started in a sense with Charles Darwin, or rather with geology and the necessity of acknowledging that the world was rather older than the Bible suggested. Essays and Reviews was published some time thereafter and went a ways to reconciling Christian faith with the new discoveries, but in a way many people thought was heretical. And the objections to it weren't all about the new science; some were about a new compassion.

For example, Henry Bristow Wilson, one of the contributing priests, had offered what Jarrett calls the 'kindly and comparatively harmless suggestion' that, rather than counting on the existence of Hell and eternal damnation for the naughty, '"we must entertain the hope that there shall be found, after the great adjucation, receptacles where the stunted may become strong and the perverted be restored."' A less kindly church court found Wilson guilty of heterodoxy for the suggestion.

However, Wilson appealed to the secular Judicial Committee of the Privy Council (something like the Supreme Court) and was cleared, partly on the basis of the committee's finding that eternal punishment was not part of the teachings of the Church of England. "He dismissed Hell with costs, and took away from orthodox members of the Church of England their last hope of eternal damnation," snarked the Spectator of the lead judge.

The reaction of the Anglican clerical heirarchy was furious, and following a synod and lots of rough talk the Convocation sent out a letter to all the priests in the land explaining that they really, definitely believed in hell and instructing them to sign a statement to that effect.

But Hell officially ceased to exist as a definite Anglican reality in the House of Lords on Friday July 15 1864 when Lord Houghton, esrtwhile suitor of Florence Nightingale and prodiguous pornography collector, pressed the issue by asking if the Convocation had had the right to send out a letter about how they all believed hell really, definitely existed and telling priests to sign it, whereupon the Lord Chancellor (head of the British judiciary until 2005) bitched that the Convocation was a futile, ridiculous body that had been suspended for its troublesomeness for a century and would be suspended again if it persisted in its hell-raising ways.

And the Anglican Church, whose highest echelon of authority is the political class, had to listen. State religion, baby; making the secular rulers of England the spiritual rulers as well was good for something besides letting Henry VIII stick his dick in Anne Boleyn with a clear conscience. Of course many Anglicans, lay and clerk, continued to insist hell was real and the world was heading there in a handbasket, but the dogmatic tide was against them.

In 1876 the Privy Council overturned another church council decision supporting a priest who had refused one Henry Jenkins communion on the basis of Jenkin's disbelief in the Devil, on the basis that belief in the Devil was not part of Anglican doctrine. The Devil - at least as far as Anglicans are concerned - disappeared in a puff of legal papers, with the unfortunate side effect that just under 120 years later Kevin Spacey managed to convince a generation of movie-goers he could act really well by delivering the line 'the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist' in the Usual Suspects.

Of course popular perceptions took much longer to change, with priests and parents continuing to use images of hell and the Devil to scare the fucking bejeebus out of their charges for decades and decades to come. But here we are some 150 years later, and Anglicans are finally complete fucking milksops about that sort of shit, and power to them.

So if all it took was a couple of court cases and a century and a half to get Anglicans to shut the fuck up about hell and the Devil, I wonder how long it will take them to shut the fuck up about how they're not comfortable with the ordination of women.

Teacher envy

I'm starting to have my doubts about Blogspot's search feature, because it's telling me I've never written about Derek Jarrett before, and I have. I adore Derek Jarrett; let me make that clear now, since I mentioned him only tangentially to his smashing book on Hogarth last time. Derek Jarrett is fucking ace.

It was the Hogarth book that done it. I picked it up when I was in a bit of an existentialist, historicistic pisser - you know, the sort where you're pissed off at your race for inventing ore smelting and you wish that you were all just living contented Stone/Golden Age lives, getting high in corridor tombs and not worrying too too much about man's inhumanity to man, and you're definitely super-pissed off about the Industrial Revolution. I like Hogarth so I thought the book would be a good antidote and have pretty pictures, but it was so much more.

Jarrett, who was a history teacher at the English equivalent of a high school once upon a time before moving off to teach history to undergrads at a London college, had an excellent way of discussing big and small picture aspects of a subject or question at the same time. Bewilderingly, in the one little book on Hogarth, you got a feeling for both the man's wider social context - through all the classes - and for the man himself. I'm dead jealous of the students who had him as a teacher. He would have been life-altering. I had my own life-altering teachers but Derek Jarrett, well, I'm dead jealous.

Anyways, I finally managed to get The Sleep of Reason: Fantasy and Reality from the Victorian Age to the First World War after trying unsuccessfully to order it from three different Amazon vendors. It came all the way from New Zealand in the end. 50 pages in and it's awesome. It turns out this hero of mine may be, in part, so good at simultaneously communicating micro- and macro-concepts because of his awareness and use of another of my heros, Carl Jung (by the way, if anybody feels like blowing well over a C note on my upcoming birthday, this would be most welcome). He can comfortably explore from this vantage the way one set of myths substitutes in for another over time.

Conclusion to the introduction, concerning the first world war and persistent establishment arguments that the horrific slaughter it entailed was some sort of necessary sacrifice:

What was the God of the Christians to do? The truth was that if by some miracle he could have made the rulers of the warring nations follow Christ's precepts the values of civilized society might have been saved. The myth was that if he had done so the world would have been cursed and degenerate, dishonoured and disgraced. It was a harsh and terrible myth which defaced and distorted the image of God to suit the needs of men. The image of God never fully recovered. The First World War succeeded in doing what all the sneers and disbelief of the nineteenth-century sceptics had failed to do.

In which I give vent to overweening emotional racism

Rodelinda and her fiancé have gone ppphhhht. They'd been facing a bit of a doozy of a situation, nothing worse than millions of other couples face, but quite aside from the wierd alchemy of personalities whose explosions and transformations are so unpredictable, it's my personal opinion they ran into some cultural problems, him being a limey and her being Canadian. Europeans are really hard to have relationships with, in my experience, and thinking back over all of my newworlders who have tried, they've failed spectacularly. Me included, and not even particularly, and mine failed fucking ferociously*.

When it comes to love Europeans seem to have such set ideas about how things are done, about the patterns of existence, and that causes the biggest problems when they try to make it with newworlders, who seem to have a greater tendency - romantic, unrealistic maybe, but certainly there, and quite frankly I wouldn't want to feel any other way - that every new relationship is like a special and unique snowflake that could lead in fascinating new directions that have never been explored before.

Maybe my feeling that way is like accent-deafness (when you can hear how weird everyone else is talking, but can't comprehend that the way you're talking is also quite weird). Maybe it's down to the friends who I'm able to have in-depth emotional talks with being like me, so I have a skewed view of my own background. Or maybe it's part and parcel of how hostile I feel these days about all the negative implications of culture and tradition - because I do see European gender dynamics west and south of here, in Belgium, as impossibly fucking sexist.

So sexist that newworld men get alienated. The behavioural expectations placed on them by French or Italian chicks that I've witnessed, for example, are just fucking ridiculous. Living in those two countries for a few years really made me realize the degree to which the new worlds' women's liberation movements were general liberation movements that have benefitted men enormously. Try telling them that though. Some of them just don't get it until they've been well and truly smothered by a couple of years of cohabitation with some perpetually angry French chick.

Speaking of guys not getting it but on a different topic altogether, here's one who does. I stumbled across this while I was looking at a bunch of things on a fat-acceptance website a nutritionist friend who's not fat posted on Facebook. I wish I had know there were fat-acceptance websites back when I was fat. As it is, I'm bookmarking it for after I have children, when I expect to get enormous, and in the meantime it's nice to read a fairly militant slice of pop-feminism. Anyways, that particular thing by Chris Clarke struck a chord because I've had so many conversations with nice men about why women who don't know them treat them like dangerous scum. I understand it hurts. But, you know. Other things hurt worse.

*I should point out my experience, while embarassingly broad, doesn't encompass the Iberian peninsula, nor Scandinavia, Germany, or points east. Until you get well into Asia.

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.