I Heart My Kitty / Men Are Trouble

Gloomy Daybreaking

I've just gone downstairs to get myself a foul, bitter cup of soupy coffee. I rarely drink the coffee at work. It comes from an old, abused espresso machine. I place the cup in the right position, hit a button and hear a collection of pipes and mechanisms grinding into action, moments before the pissy liquid is produced like the jet stream of an old dog. I mix lots of sugar in it, and a fair amount of milk but nothing seems to disguise the taste of detergent build up and stale coffee. This was the cup of coffee I had this morning, bitter and pungent, offensive to every one of the senses. A very suitable taste for such a morning.
I get the underground into work everyday but only for a couple of stops. Although this seems to be more than enough time to irreversibly piss me off. Getting on to the cramped vessel this morning, I asked very politely if a woman who was obstructing the aisle could move so as to allow a few more people on. She looked back at me blankly and said "No. There's no space" when clearly there was. She looked like an accountant, her hair was pulled back in a tight bun, it seemed to pull her features back with it making her taut and unsmiling. Like a cruel headmistress. Like Someone who would kick a puppy. So taken aback by such selfishness all I could mutter was a petty "well if you'd rather have us all crammed over here fine...". FINE. I got a few sympathetic looks from people around me. People taking sides in a little silent battle of futile wills. I loathe the passive aggressive mutterings of London commuters. I hate that I am one of them. I hate people. I'll drown thoughts of them in acrid cups of coffee which burn my lips and wonder how I can escape this.

A letter from Steely Dan to Wes Andersen

No seriously - have a look here.

Wes Andersen's giving a Q&A for the London Film Festival. I really want to go. My friend Stuart is involved in this event somehow. He said he'll get me a ticket, but he said it in an awfully casual way. I want to draw up a little contract he can sign to make sure he's not going to forget. But then I risk alienating him completely.

hmm...what a pickle...

I've been trapped in a cycle of blog reading...

...and most stuff that's popular seems repetitive in its quirkiness and cuteness. Especially the cuteness-belying-darkness-and-ennui slant.

Quirkiness makes a lot of shit appealing. In fact you could probably actually stick some sad-looking eyes, a hat and a miniature Guardian newspaper on a real turd and render it quirky! Thus making it an overnight blogging sensation, newspaper headlines (probably in the Guardian) would read "Isn't it Novel!?" And I'd say no it's not, its a fucking turd I've just placed it in a "quirky" context - don't you see? Isn't this device totally transparent? Can't you see that at the heart of this idea, is shit?

In the unlikely event of someone reading my blog, please don't be offended because you're friend writes a cute blog from the point of view of a moose or something, and you think its fantastic. I don't mean to generalize and maybe the fucking moose blog is brilliant.

Who am I anyway?

Henry Goes to the Shop to Escape the Increasingly Pervasive Atmosphere of Isolation and Doom in his South London Flat

Tired and Bored

Today I wrote a poem and sent it off to someone. I can't tell what I think about things I write. If I took that poem and left it in a drawer for me to find again a year from now I might be able to give an opinion on it.

I'm inclined to think it's bad but I won't let that stop me. No sir.

Venting the Spleen

In the free train paper on Monday there was a picture of Britney Spears, in fishnets, stiletto boots and a spangly knickers+bra combo. She was squatting over a male dancer who looked slightly harassed. Her back was arched and her mouth was a little way open, in an overtly sexual way, a genuine cum face which makes one feel dirty just to look upon it. The blurb underneath said that her comeback at the MTV music awards was panned by critics*, it went on to say that witnesses said she looked overweight and was not miming her lyrics properly. My friend and I were reading the same newspaper, wincing over the horrendous decline of the micky mouse star that was. She said "oooh thats not nice!" and I said "yeah, she's too fat". Then there was this little silence and miss p said "she's not too fat.."
Uh Oh...this is where my ridiculous body standards and those of normal happy people collide. Miss p is a lovely girl, with big bunny rabbit eyes and something else behind them - is it wisdom? Something like it anyway. Something that betokens a down-to-earth pleasantly cultivated sensibility. A genuinely nice person, even when she exposes a nasty sentiment like jealousy she does it in such charming way you'd never think less of her for it. Of course, she's right, the real issue isn't simply that she's large by MTV standards, it is that she's a broken ex-pop star that can't seem to handle growing up. Her desperate slutting about on MTV is the issue, not that she's gained a few pounds. But to me, desperate failure and a little bit of fat are inseparable. I must seem awfully morose and spiteful to her, despite all my attempts to edit my thoughts before they spill out of me and into those little silences.


*Just what kind of critics do you get at the MTV awards?

A Night on the Town

I lean down to place the cool glass between my feet. Somewhere in front of me a band is playing, fretting they're half hour upon the stage. Twisted egos vying for adulation, falling short, shrugged off like the unwanted lustful attention of a drunk slapper. My bead necklace hangs floorwards, first cajoled by the forces of the earth, then rapidly coerced. The beads dig into my neck uncomfortably pulling me towards to the black glacial surface at my feet. I pass out, into the narrow but infinitely deep pool. Its depth and darkness is total but I can feel the cold walls on either side of me covered by the faces of clocks, as I sink like a drowned Alice. I wake up angry, another day behind me. Flowers of red have bloomed across my neck and my heart has hardened a little more against the words I speak in boredom. I close down. I want to go home until I've found something to say to these confident souls.

SEXY SNAKE MENACE

Photographs I Took of Projected Photographs My Husband Took in the Past when on Holiday with a Beautiful ex-Girlfriend

Mother F**king

This one time I upset my mother worse than ever before. I had written a story for a 'creative writing' exam about her, sometime during the purgatory years of high school. It contained waffling teenage prose about Bob Dylan's "Jokerman" and bottles and bottles of white wine she consumed during the witching hour, her irreconcilable issues with her father and mother which have burdened her since birth, her catholic school upbringing where the nuns would rap children across the knuckles for answering and not answering a question and where children would urinate involuntarily in fear. All this I scribbled across my lined A4 page hurriedly before my time ran out. Ah my newly acquired adolescent bitterness! Somewhere I wrote she'd "grown fat with domesticity". It was a stupid story, but my teacher thought it was marvelous and put it in the school magazine where my mother and everyone within our microcosm found it. She was horrified. She must've wondered why she endured the pain of childbirth and the tedium of child-raising only to have this girl-child spit back at her. I felt terrible, there were feeble attempts to deny it was about her, and eventually it was pushed under the rug. I'm waiting for Time to make it funny. When the day comes I will laugh until I'm sick.

The Time I saw Sutcliffe Jugend...

My ears were torn apart and bleeding, but the sound rumbling through my chest like an earth quake was visceral and immediately disorientating. Layers of frequencies ranged from long piercing pins to blunt clawing growls, accompanied by a fascistic personality barking like a tommy guns' rattle. I'm not sure what his incendiary ranting was about. It was like a deranged rally where the point is the rage and rant itself, nevermind the ideology. It was music for the deaf. I recognized snatches of it but never a coherent stream. I also saw Sonic Youth play Daydream Nation who were...oddly comforting, like nostalgia.