"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.
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> Q. Why shouldn't you wear Russian underpants?
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> A. Chernobyl fallout.
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> 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.

fred.

what i did today.

I can hear fat people breathing.

I can hear it louder than trains and it irks me. It bothers me an unhealthy amount.

I went to South Africa for 2 weeks. My skin is patchy and sunburnt, I feel weathered and healthy. I climbed mountains and rode horses across beaches with toothpaste white sand and listerene blue water. Thats what those colours made me think of. Teeth.

Now I'm back at work, in front of my screen which hums and waits with answers and dead ends. I feel I can't adapt to London and its cold and dirt, to 2008 and to this screen in front of me.

Peckham and an acute feeling of repulsion and pity

We went to go see a good 'ol holiday season blockbuster on Saturday night. It seems like an appropriate thing to do when feeling gritty on the inside from a fairly debauched evening the night before. We drove to the Peckham multiplex because once inside it is a nice, spacious cinema and, above all, it is cheap and convenient. I don't like Peckham, or at least the bits I've seen. This is not snobbish. The level(s) on which I find Peckham offensive are purely down to the basic senses; smell, taste and most of all sight. On previous ill-conceived journeys through Peckham, I have consistently felt the urge to be sick all over its greasy pavements, littered with the oily bones of fried chickens. There are many, many butchers stalls in Peckham, which seem to be unrefrigerated. The stench of slowly deteriorating meat is choking, and in the summer, the air is thick with insects thriving off the rot. There are fish markets and fried chicken shops in between the meat markets, and these varying odours come together in a terrific cacophony of stench.

Anyway, on this occasion, we had heard about free parking at the back of the cinema. Having on our last trip gotten a 50 quid parking fine, we decided that to investigate free parking would be a safer option. We drove round to find a five storey car park glowing in the dark with the shadow-swallowing light of a hundred flourescent tubes. A sign beside the entrance said that free parking for the cinema was available on floor five. Being cautious we decided to do what the sign says and circled through the deserted car park up to the fifth floor. It felt like we were driving through the weathered remains of the skeleton of a massive, prehistoric beast. We parked our car next to the only other car there and headed for the lifts. There were three elevators, and we waited patiently for one to admit us. Having pressed a scuffed looking button we heard much groaning and mechanical misfiring before the middle elevators grim mouth gaped open before us, as though silently screaming. Inside it was gloomy (most of the lights were out) and cold. The walls looked as though they had been attacked with keys. The doors shut, and in the darkness I felt I had been swallowed. The doors shut and nothing happened. Pj tried pressing buttons and seeing him press the buttons repeatedly without anything happening immediately made me panic and I leapt at the "open doors" button. Thankfully the doors complied and groaned open. I was out of there like a cat out of a bag. I headed straight for the stairwell overwhelmed by a false sense of relief. Pj laughed behind me.

The stairwell like the rest of that ruined building, was bare concrete and strip lighting. We descended one floor and could see shadows pooling around the corner. The light was out on that floor. On the convex mirror on the wall ahead I noticed a shape on the stair. As I turned the corner I found its living reflection, slumped against the concrete, in the dark. It was a junkie who had obviously sought out the most lonely dark place in the world, this bare, bitterly cold stairwell. His trousers were pulled down to his knees, revealing blueish white thighs. There was a small needle sticking straight out of his fleshless inner thigh. His face was covered in a red beard. somewhere between the hat and the beard were a pair of blue watery eyes atop gaunt cheekbones. The eyes looked like they were fixed on a distant point behind us. Just watching back at us, like we were characters on a movie screen. I stopped on the second stair and Pj stood behind me. "Let's not go this way."

I walked straight passed Pj still stood on the landing and walked briskly back to the car. Very briskly and purposefully. Pj followed me and as we got back to the car, Pj giggled and I whined "Please can we get out of here." We got back in the car and circled back down. We parked outside.
We laughed as if to shake off the image of that bare thigh. We grimaced and laughed. All the way through that family blockbuster I felt those fish-like eyes staring back. It was sick.