The Red Dragon self-flagellates

Sick as hell. These past couple of months have taken me and broken me, and my fucking body has decided to punish me for not getting pregnant yet by getting rid of my dragonly cramps and replacing them with nausea; I'd really prefer the pain . . . I have a degree of paranoia that I'll be one of those pregnant women who spend the whole nine months puking and the present situation isn't helping me deal with that paranoia. But the lovely Rodelinda, that gem among women, sent me Marks and Spencers chocolate-covered gingersnaps and those have fixed allllmost everything. No wonder men all lose their fucking minds when she dumps them. She's so awesome.

In the meantime, my Christmas vacation has now started. Luke Duke sent us a couple of books on Spain as we're flying out tonight - luckily throwing up all over aeroplanes won't be breaking any new experiential ground for me - which means I am going to go get busy reading them, now that I'm done with Stalin's Children. Which was fine. The first half was really good and the second half wasn't, so, altogether, fine.

Luke Duke's gifts: Ghosts of Spain and ¡Guerra!. They look pretty good. You know what I love about Spanish? The fucking upside-down exclamation points and question marks. That is really awesome. You know right away at the beginning of the phrase if it's going to be exciting or interrogatory. I love that. And yesterday I was given to understand that our Asian division is haemmoraging money so the odds of me being able to continue my job without interruption whilst moving to Australia are poor - but honestly work has stressed and exhausted me so badly over the last little while that I had to welcome that news - especially as it means the F-word and I get to pursue one of the more attractive Plan B's we've ever had: before moving to the Antipodes, we go spend a few months in Spain, doing the Camino and learning that awesome language. I don't speak a word of it of course, but I can usually figure out what they're talking about if they want me to because of its similarities with Italian, so I think given three or four months there I'll be able to pick up a lot of it.

In the meantime, my sweethearts, I'm not going to be posting on this blog; will return the week after Christmas, hopefully stuffed to the brim with tapas and ham, ham, ham. Very lovely holidays to you all; may your indiscretions be discreet, your pleasures shameless, your carbon footprint smaller than mine, and you and yours very very happy above all.

Attrition position

I shouldn't whine, first of all; the distribution of work after my boss disappeared was equitable and then this week I went back to my 'normal' workload, since when I leave for vacation means I'll be missing a deadline; so my other boss was the one who really broke her head over the proceedings for the publications-in-process. But in any case the lead-up to Christmas is bloody hell.

Possibly you remember last December, when my own company sacked 10 people in December to squeak the cuts in before the end of the calendar year? Well on the offchance you're some sort of corporate innocent, a teacher or a family-owned business worker or some such fucking quaint thing, and sacking a whole fuckload of people just before the Most Wonderful Fucking Day of the Year seems inhumane to you, here's some sad news: all the fucking public companies do that shit.

It gives them a chance to write down any losses involved in severance in the old year, it gives them a more attractive cost base for the new year, and it gives them a couple of weeks when the people they sack had already made plans to spend time with their friends and family in a way that our professional lives no longer permit us to do at any other fucking time of the year (and I whine this out as a European with five weeks holiday a year), which cuts the chances of difficult confrontations and even of really stiff or extended severance negotiations. Etc. Ground we've covered before.

But the arse of it all as far as I'm concerned at the moment is that December isn't on the easy end of the 'normal' workload because there's so much goddamn news about the cash-strapped companies in my industry shutting down factories and sacking a kajillion people. Yesterday afternoon, whilst working toward our 4 o'clock deadline, some fucker of a fucking northern European company announced a bunch of shutdowns and sackings at about 2:50. And the cunts scheduled a conference call for half an hour later. And I had already been juggling writing some other shutdowns, as well as a couple of near-fatal accidents (which also seem to step up around Christmas). I mean, the fucking bastards.

Anyways, with any luck today the clear sailing starts. And then Friday night we leave, and I come home to some light and non-pressing of Orthodox Christian and Muslim markets. But I'll tell you, for the fucking moment my head is close to bursting.

Pathologilarity

Lately we have been enjoying John Safran's new ABC series, Race Relations. It's pretty fucking awesome, and for me roughly - errrr - x 1,000,000 better than anything Sacha Baron Cohen has done since the Ali G interview with Noam Chomsky, and even that was only at parity.

The really remarkable thing about John Safran relative to other comedians who use shock-and-awe interviewing techniques with unsuspecting subjects for sheer hilarity is that the sheer hilarity grows out of John Safran leaving you with a niggling suspicion that John Safran is a complete fucking mongoloid whose mental problems go well beyond the average comedian-neuroses. And gawking at that doesn't weigh on the conscience, because obviously he isn't, or at least not pathologically enough that he's missed out on having a thriving career. It's not as fucking funny as it is because of horrid mothers pimping out their babies for photoshoots, or because of baying white trash Americans getting pissed off by two guys making out - things which I would argue, whatever their merits as documentary, aren't fucking funny at all.

Here's the clip that convinced the F-word we should watch it:



And here's a clip of what I mean about the pathological mental problems :



And I promise you it only gets worse, or better, depending on your perspective.

Shit too heavy

I've started having nightmares about my missing boss, who I see standing with his back to me, and who won't turn around even though I yell at him until I wake myself up. So I'm restarting analysis. Any excuse, apparently.

Just when you thought that a navel couldn't get any more gazed . . . Luckily this is Belgium, so there will probably be a certain degree of ridiculousness involved in even getting an appointment.

Gah.

Things to address with a professional

Finally it's colded up here, dropped below zero with the attendant fucking off of the bloody seemingly inexhaustible supply of grey drizzly clouds and the sun reappearing in her finest ice-maiden form. Thank god. I was about to lose my shit. I think the F-word and I understand each other decently well, but there's a bit of a gap in the weather-sense; I'm fine with cold as long as there's sun, he's fine with no fucking sun as long as it's good and warm. Hopefully we find a way to reconcile that. My plan at the moment is to buy a cottage in Canada with Luke Duke and Magnum so that I can spend northern hemisphere summers there, and southern hemiphere summers, well, in the fucking southern hemisphere, obviously. But for now with wide blue skies and the sun out, I'm ace. Brussels is really pretty with a touch of sun.

Reading Stalin's Children, at the insistence of a Ukrainian colleague, who probably insisted because I ask her too many questions about the Ukraine and Russia, because I'd like to go see what it's like myself but I'm afraid I'd get beaten up for looking too Jewy. Here's a Westerner who really understands what things there are like in what used to be the USSR, she said. Well damn. It's not a bad book (though maybe a little turgid when it comes to the description of the author's first-hand impressions of himself and of modern Russia, which is really annoying but at page 150 so far mercifully brief) but it sounds like things are absolutely shitty there and have been for ages.

Reading this book with rapt attention, especially so soon after reading Goodbye to All That with rapt attention, especially especially after managing to sit through 2012 even if I didn't enjoy it besides the car chase close to the beginning, makes me wonder if I have a thing for humanitarian disaster porn. Probably something I should address with a professional.

I have seen the friture brother, it is murder

Yesterday I was chatting with my boss about how a halfway decent restaurant next to our office suddenly shut down with no fanfare or warning, and how it was a bit of a shame, and how it would have been nice if it had served fries, when she dropped this bombshell on me: it didn't serve fries because it wasn't part of the union. The fry union. The National Union of Friturists. I'm fucking serious, here's their website.

Frankly I'm still not wholly believing this isn't an elaborate joke being played on me by my boss. But it does stand to reason, because there is a particular technique of fry-making here which is ubiquitous, and ubiquitously good, but also more labor-intensive than the typical chop-dry-boil-serve of Anglo-Saxonia. And now I find myself doing something I rarely do, which is praise Belgium.

Belgian fries are fucking good, and make it almost utterly non-worthwhile to buy fries back home from the vast majority of places that serve them, except from a few places, sometimes dreadfully expensive pretentious type places and sometimes greasy spoons, that use what is the ubiquitous method here: chop-dry-boil-drain-boil-serve. Far more crispy, and perhaps counter-intuitively far less fatty, at least as far as taste and texture go.

Okay - once in awhile, when you've been roughing it in the bush for a bit in Northern Ontario and you've got a dreadful hunger on and there's some chip truck selling fries with fresh pickerel or something lovely like that, it's quite nice to have a big soggy mess of piping-fresh chop-dry-boil-serve potatoes to eat because they still taste like potatoes, in a way, and the dripping-fattiness isn't unwelcome. And as a convert to the joys of poutine, I believe, perhaps erroneously but blow me, motherfucker, that it wouldn't be nearly as good with chop-dry-boil-drain-boil-serve chips as it is with chop-dry-boil-serve, because with poutine I believe the whole point is to ensure maximum dripping fat uptake in an effort to soak up a drug and alcohol binge (thank you for helping me live with my vices, Quebec).

But I find I have to really be in the mood for those, or else dead drunk or coming off amphetamines, the second of which won't happen again until I have a mid-life crisis in twenty years, while chop-dry-boil-drain-boil-serve chips, while in the end rather less recognizably tasting of potatoes, are always really fucking good.

So anyways, good on you, National Union of Friturists. Solidarity! But I wonder what they do to non-unionized people who make chips, or union members who commit heresy and make chop-dry-boil-serve chips. I almost don't want to know how this particular delicious sausage is made. . .

Would we recognize ourselves 40 years ago

Reading more Hannah Arendt now, On Revolution, and starting to get the feeling - I'm only about 15 pages in so maybe it will be corrected soon - that the poor woman died at the right time. Never saw the 80's and never saw Western society's flawless, splashless dive into utter individuality and the consequent annhilation of the polis, of her ideas of freedom and equality, and indeed of ideology in an abstract sense though I don't know if she'd have minded the last.

I mean, what would she have made of a jerkoff of a blog like this one I'm writing right now, where I whine about my feelings and how I think World War II should have been fought and go on about my favourite kinds of trees, which I write in the morning before I head off to a career which exists in some sick nether-zone between work and action . . . oh I don't know. It's not as bad as all that. I'm just in a poopy mood.

And really my job isn't as bad as all that, in some ways it's smashing, and I've even started largely appreciating our Yankee overlords, though we'll see how long that lasts if they neglect to give me the Australian contract, that will propel me into the upper - count it - the upper middle class. And anytime in the past week or so that I've been feeling poopy about my job, I've looked at this blog, that was on one of the Friday mail-outs by the guy who runs Sickipedia, and I count my blessings.

How not to end a war

Whilst going off to all and sundry here about how awesome Rotterdam is, how exciting the new architecture is, how beautifully arranged it all is, I have got reactions ranging from disbelief to curiousity to agreement to Miss C's - she couldn't find it, as a reconstruction, beautiful because of the suffering that had been involved in its flattening. Can't contradict that, of course, it's quite true. Rotterdam on the brain, combined with the fact that its flattening was used as a reason, to a certain extent, for the beginning of the RAF assault on German civilians, and Hilts' obsession, and certain inevitable thoughts at the moment about the suffering of the innocent, is making me sit around thinking about the second world war.

Back in my strategy concentration in Paris, we were taught that the role massive city bombing played in World War II was an emotive one, to a point. The Luftwaffe were doing too good a job knocking out British airfields in the first part of the war, so the RAF broke with accepted practice and started the massive bombing of German cities, beginning with Berlin. This produced the desired effect of nudging the Luftwaffe into retaliating with British city bombing, drawing their limited resources away from strategic bombing - sacrificing British proles pawns, so to speak, to keep the queeny-poo of ensuring air superiority. And after that the city bombing had its own twisted, retributive logic.

But did it hasten the end of the war? I don't think so. It's a sort of Law of Nature that gets drilled into you in strategy studies - Air Power Doesn't Win Wars. Maybe mutable or not, but one thing is sure in this case: Germany didn't surrender because German civilians were tired of getting bombed by the RAF, it surrendered because the Russians had arrived. And while the argument that Germany was easier to overrun because of all the important things that had been bombed is a persuasive one, I find it less persuasive than the argument that the German army and population went on fighting as long as they did because of their fury over how their cities had all been burnt down, or because of fear of what enemies who had shown so little mercy to civilians would do to them if they put down arms.

I honestly believe the Germans could have allowed fifty genocidal tyrants to come to power, and the English could have allowed their governors to go on murdering and enslaving darkies in the colonies for another 50 years, and neither group would have morally deserved to have their lives, happiness, and sanity abused by their leaders in such a disgusting and futile way. But who deserves anything anways.

The joys of being middle class on a fast train to Paris

Had a smashing weekend in Paris. There's a sentence I never thought would come out of my brain but I guess eventually things just stop doing your head in, which is a good thing to know in the present context. La New Yorkaise is moving home definitively on Wednesday, and like a good former fellow inmate of the fucking madhouse that is Pars when you're underemployed, I swanned down on the Thalys and helped her pack. Which translated into about two actual hard slog hours - she's already shipped most of her stuff - and me getting some really great castoffs that wouldn't fit in her hold luggage, like a camping chair and an awesome sleeping bag and enough good quality acrylic paint to make the F-word's eyes light up. So the time spent with her was lovely and the time spent with Miss C, whose loft we stayed in once more, was even lovelier, in a way. She starts a year-long treatment programme for hepatitis today, and has no idea how it will go, so I suppose she drank her last few glasses of wine for a long while with us . . . both of those women are so dear to me in such different ways.

And discovered my theory about Paris is correct - if you have lots of money, it's actually a great place to be.

And read two books on trains - well, finished one, read the other - Bad Medicine by David Wooton and Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh. Decline and Fall - well. Brideshead Revisited was such a nasty little downer (in a good way, though) that I was not expecting that surreal little romp. I enjoyed it a great deal though. Very talky, very visual. I've written before about how awful I think authors like Ian McEwan and that guy who wrote The Hours are, in that their shitty books read like script treatments instead of novels and it's an abuse of the medium. But besides me hating Ian McEwan et al, I think that also has something to do with the way I hate most movies. Because Decline and Fall reads a bit like a treatment for an exceptionally good stage show - very dialogue driven - and I still loved it. But then the narrative voice was still awfully good, so not completely. Anyways. It was ace.

Bad Medicine was alright too but sometimes the argumentation was a little laboured. Wooton keeps so busy reminding you that he has an argument that it can get quite distracting from the actual elements of the argument. He was fitting so much into such a small book that I have a feeling a few conjunctions ended up on the cutting room floor when a few too many protests from Wooton about why he should be allowed to write about progress as a historical fact stayed in when they shouldn't have.

I get it. Progress. You like it. It exists. You wrote about it in your fucking introduction. Please, write a history of medicine, and write a history of the history of medicine, but if you're going to splice them don't do it in a mere 320 pages (though I understand it fits nicely onto the bestseller list at that length, but that's no more excuse for writing an insufficiently readable book than the fact that 'novelists' like McEwan make the big bucks from actually selling their books as film treatments), not unless you've got Darrin fucking McMahon level expressive finesse. And I'll tell you - Bad Medicine isn't a bad book, but Wooton does not have Darrin Fucking McMahon-level finesse.

It's a valid comparison, even if I'm only making it because I got the F-word Happiness for Christmas. McMahon, when he wrote about happiness and the history of happiness, forswore historical accounts of people who didn't write much or who wrote outside of the 'canon' (ie everybody post-Bhagavad Gita in Asia) as it was called back in my undergrad days. Wooton restricted himself similarly. Obviously that still leaves you with rather a lot of material, so if you're going to spend 15% of your words explaining to the reader that you're picking a fight, and if you lack McMahon-type finesse - honestly it's a wonder the book is readable at all. But it is, almost despite him.

Victor Jara has had his second funeral.



Impossible to juxtapose that death and that voice. Not without getting into Jesus talk. People are such stupid brutes; he'd just been a rather lovely folk singer before. Now juxtaposed forever with some ugly foul-mouthed troglodytes in Washington who thought the world was dominoes.

What a life.

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.