Peculiar Compliment

"Stop smiling or you'll murder someone!"

I've always suspected that murder might come from a part of me but I never guessed it was my smile.

PLAY!

What's on the telly!

I walk into a room. There's a television. On the screen a woman is crying, her face all creased and wet and the ink in her eyes dripping. She's saying something vague about life. She appears to be at a turning point and the camera is there to witness the revelation. The shot cuts but her voice continues weak and relentless. The next shot is of her again, a wider shot, a different time and place. The eye of the camera is at her back as she shuffles through a department store. She's wearing a skull cap with wires attached to a box that looks like a car battery at her waist and a gaudy waistcoat. She grabs at clothes, every item spasms with colour as she lurches amongst the racks. The wires move oddly atop her head, responding to her irregular gait. Like branches. The shot cuts again. Her voice has stopped but I hadn't noticed, I notice now as a it is replaced by a more demanding intrusive one. Assertive, this voice asserts itself. Graphs appear; a parade of science. A line representing her brain activity, like earth quakes. The shot cuts back to her face, a daughter is resting a supportive hand on one sloped shoulder. The daughter looks like her mother but younger, but only just. The daughter watches her crumpled dishwater mother weep and smiles because at least now she's realized. What an awful waste of space she has let herself become. The camera cuts back to her lost amongst the racks of clothes, the skull cap apparatus, the bewildered face.

HOT.

Hello.

nice.

McCARTHY.

"The following evening as they rode up onto the western rim they lost one of the mules. It went skittering off down the canyon wall with the contents of the panniers exploding soundlessly in the hot dry air and it fell through sunlight and through shade, turning in that lonely void until it fell from sight into a sink of cold blue space that absolved it forever of memory in the mind of any living thing that was."

oh yes. McCarthy.

Make me a non-human.

today I want run. i want to run so that my heart pounds louder than traffic. I want sweat to run over me like water over sheer rock. I want to run as if being chased, like a dog. But my body is flawed. My breath would seize in my chest like a fist around my heart. My bones would stick and jar. Someone needs to take my bones apart, smooth them down and put them back together again. So I could run and keep running away. From my own boring thoughts .

"Elliot Smithing"

Elliot Smith has been verbed.

Definition: listening to the music of Elliot Smith while attempting to fold the body in half in order to suppress a stress related tummy ache, can include crying but not necessarily. Person will usually remain motionless in this position even once the music of Elliot Smith has ceased.

For example: I spent the afternoon Elliot Smithing because my cat died.

Stuart Helps.

I said I felt like shit and Stuart said:

Oh dear.
>
> Q. Why shouldn't you wear Russian underpants?
>
> A. Chernobyl fallout.
>
>
> Feeling better?

Peaks and Troughs and Class Hatred.

I'm very much in a trough at the moment. My kitty went missing for a week, we found her on Saturday locked in a neighbours basement. I could hear her plaintive cries and soon became inwardly hysterical, the feeling a little like -I imagine -a new mother gets when she hears her baby's first gurgling screams. But cats are, for the moment, the extent of my mothering instincts. The family weren't home and we could only assume they were on holiday and my poor kitty was starved and dehydrated in that cold basement. So we broke the window, pushing at it tentatively until it cracked so the pane of glass resembled territories on a map. Kitty felt lighter when we got her out but seemed fine and a little ungrateful, we thought. But she did spend some time meowing at us with fierce affection and pushing her head under our hands, so I guess its ok. The neighbours returned the following morning. I feel an intense resentment towards these neighbours, which I guess isn't fair. Something to do with them having a basement in which to hoard crap, which is the same area we live in adjacent to them. A basement. We live in a basement, with carpets and a kitchen. They have this space just to keep the things they don't need. And to trap cats in. Something about paying these cunts 150 quid for an emergency call out to fix a window to a basement that has bars on. Something about that woman's self-rightousness, and her clipped middle class manner of speaking. Something about her gormless kids sitting in the back of their people carrier.

Just makes me angry.