"Every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. And, the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand. It really is the most poetic thing I know about physics: You are all stardust. You couldn’t be here if stars hadn’t exploded, because the elements - the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, all the things that matter for evolution and for life - weren’t created at the beginning of time. They were created in the nuclear furnaces of stars, and the only way for them to get into your body is if those stars were kind enough to explode. The stars died so that you could be here today." 

- Lawrence M. Krauss

Memorable Week(end) Quotes and Vistas.

"I want to bring back shit photography." 
"If anyone could bring it back you could."

"I can't tell the difference between a hipster and a normal person."

"Trust in the decisions you have made."

"Can you take a book to a trance festival?" 

I keep leaving cake in people's fridges wherever I go.

I try to make every meal more salad than anything else in order to maintain my monstrously dull personality.

"We the American working population
Hate the fact that eight hours a day
Is wasted on chasing the dream of someone that isn't us
And we may not hate our jobs,
But we hate jobs in general
That don't have to do with fighting our own causes.
We the American working population
Hate the nine to five day-in/day-out
But we'd rather be supporting ourselves
By being paid to perfect the pastimes
That we have harbored based solely on the fact
That it makes us smile if it sounds dope."

I took an anorexic to an all you can eat buffet once.

Creatives are so full of it.

Memorable Weekend Quotes.

"Hickley there was an earthquake right? 

  That night you slept in my bed."

"Your expression, it's a mixture of terror and awe. 

  I recognise it. I see it in dance halls all the time."

"Your whole life has been a fib! A dirty little fib!"

Decisions have been made.

        I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked.  

        One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. 

        I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.

- Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

Circa 1978.

Thumbed.

A Day in Thoughts.

04:38 - Woke up sweating from a horrifying dream. Thought 'remember not to use
               your toilet it's getting fixed, walk down the hall'.

07:50 - Woke up groaning audibly, yet again from the same or similar horrifying 
               dream. Thought 'death' and 'dying' and 'tiring'.

09:57 - Walking to the bathroom thought 'my jeans are fantastically tight and I'm
               ready to party'.

10:09 - Thought 'fuck this fuck this fuck this'.

12:00 - Watching my creative director design a calendar thought 'yes', 'Investec' and
               'put a grid on it' in the same tone that I would have said 'put a bird on it'.

12:39 - Thought 'fuck this shit'.

12:44 - Thought 'I would almost marry you if we weren't completely different people
              and if you cared about me'.

12:44 + 3 seconds - Thought 'that was a lie thought'. 

13:03 - Looking at myself in the mirror thought 'my boobs are rocking' and 'wish my
              period boobs were my regular boobs'. 

13:36 - Locked eyes with a man also eating an apple in a crowded shopping mall and
              thought 'yes', 'we are different' and 'should we stop and chat'.

13:48 - Thought 'these shorts are nice but they're on the rail just as you walk into the
              shop and they're on the mannequin so lots of girls will buy them I don't want
              something everyone will have more so because others will look better in these
              than I will' but with no self-deprecation, just observation.

14:16 - Thought 'hot ham'. 

15:29 - Thought 'my goodness I am an adult this should not make me feel so trembly'.

19:52 - Buying cigarettes for my brother at the gas station thought 'do I look
              awkward because I feel it' and 'hate the fact that the guy behind me now thinks
              that I smoke'.

19:56 - Thought 'it would be good if people saw me singing into my hand microphone
              it would make them smile maybe and even lighten up' but instinctively lowered
              my hand when the next car drove by. Thought 'I am a disgrace'.

20:04 - Thought 'I do just imitate the singer's voice in a song' and 'I don't know what
               my own voice sounds like'.

20:08 - Thought 'everyone's stoned on the highway they're all driving at 80'.

20:10 - Thought 'I don't know what my own voice sounds like' but in an exclamatory
               way and 'it's hard to sing with it I don't even know how' in a sad way.

20:11 - Thought 'highway'.

20:56 - Thought 'this is what's wrong with the world' repeatedly.

21:15 - Walked on the treadmill and thought
              'Uni Freight'
              'Chipkins'
              'Sea World'
              'Triton Express'
              'Greyhound'

21:43 - Really felt like scrambled eggs, found two hard boiled eggs in a pan on the
              stove and thought 'yes' very happily.

21:45 - Cracked one of the eggs on the counter and raw egg ran out. Thought 'no'              
              very sadly.

22:16 - Thought 'sleep'.

23:07 - Thought 'sleep'.

Memorable Weekend Quotes.

"Everything's been said. 

 But not everything's been done."

Hugging aloneness.

Layover.

Making love in the sun, in the morning sun
in a hotel room
above the alley
where poor men poke for bottles;
making love in the sun
making love by a carpet redder than our blood,
making love while the boys sell headlines
and Cadillacs,
making love by a photograph of Paris
and an open pack of Chesterfields,
making love while other men – poor folks –
work.

That moment – to this. . .
may be years in the way they measure,
but it's only one sentence back in my mind-
there are so many days
when living stops and pulls up and sits
and waits like a train on the rails.
I pass the hotel at 8
and at 5; there are cats in the alleys
and bottles and bums,
and I look up at the window and think,
I no longer know where you are,
and I walk on and wonder where
the living goes
when it stops.

Charles Bukowski

Cognitive dissonance.

Fat Fredddddddddyy.

25/08.

I distinctly remember trying to trade a tampon for some sort of foodstuffs a gentleman had in my dream last night.

Sunday Morning.

Best enjoyed alone.
In a place that is not your own.
Lying in the bath, or on the floor. 
Heard softly through the closed door.

With the faint layer of human sound that is an apartment building,
creeping up the gap where the water drains.

Sunday Afternoon.

Nuclear family with two small boys sit near you in the park. They are foreign so you relax.
They are speaking a beautiful European language.

You ask what it is.
It is German.

You would have never guessed German.

Think how an international female spy would not only have known it was German, but would have been able to understand and fluently speak the language.

Sincerely and intensely for not the first time rue the fact that you never became an international female spy.

I would pretty much choose sleep over most things.

The flurry of movement behind the bar bathroom keyhole.

Memorable Weekend Quotes.

"I'm not making fucking art here, Amy. I'm just looking to make some money." Gold.

"He will break you and I will not intervene."

"They're obviously trying to make a point."

"You've got to be hardcore to be on crutches, and cause shit."

"We would have the deepest conversations on the beach."

"And in the split second before it happened I said, show me that you are here. And then right after that I said no, because faith is about not having to..."

I'd like some food brought to me please.

Like fish.

And chips.

With vinegar.

And salt.

Tomato sauce.

And greasy grey paper.

A lemon to squeeze.

No napkins.

I don't care for them.

It may come in a packet.

Or in a box.

It does not matter.

So long as it fills me.

And crunches when I bite it.

It must stay hot.

All these things.

Just these things.


...


It could also be cake.

Talk Less and Say More.

Song Off #3

Pink Bullets.

I was just bony hands as cold as a winter pole
You held a warm stone out new flowing blood to hold
Oh what a contrast you were
To the brutes in the halls
My timid young fingers held a decent animal.

Over the ramparts you tossed
The scent of your skin and some foreign flowers
Tied to a brick
Sweet as a song
The years have been short but the days were long.

Cool of a temperate breeze from dark skies to wet grass
We fell in a field it seems now a thousand summers passed
When our kite lines first crossed
We tied them into knots
And to finally fly apart
We had to cut them off.

Since then it's been a book you read in reverse
So you understand less as the pages turn
Or a movie so crass
And awkwardly cast
That even I could be the star.

I don't look back as much as a rule
And all this way before murder was cool
But your memory is here and I'd like it to stay
Warm light on a winter day.

Over the ramparts you tossed
The scent of your skin and some foreign flowers
Tied to a brick
Sweet as a song
The years have been short but the days go slowly by
Two loose kites falling from the sky
Drawn to the ground and an end to flight. 

Morose Mondamy.

 

124-130.

        He walked slowly to the end of the gallery, staring at its contents and saying nothing; and then suddenly he broke out: "I hoped you wouldn't write to me that way."
        "It was the only way, Lord Warburton," said the girl. "Do try and believe that."
        "If I could believe it of course I should let you alone, but we can't believe by willing it; and I confess I don't understand. I could understand your disliking me; that I could understand well. But that you should admit you do-"
        "What have I admitted?" Isabel interrupted, turning slightly pale.
        "That you think me a good fellow; isn't that it?" She said nothing, and he went on: "You don't seem to have any reason, and that gives me a sense of injustice."
        "I have a reason, Lord Warburton." She said it in a tone that made his heart contract.
        "I should like very much to know it."
        "I'll tell you some day when there's more to show for it."
        "Excuse my saying that in the meantime I must doubt of it."
        "You make me very unhappy," said Isabel.
        "I'm not sorry for that; it may help you to know how I feel. Will you kindly answer me a question?" Isabel made no audible assent, but he apparently saw in her eyes something that gave him courage to go on. " Do you prefer some one else?"
        "That's a question I'd rather not answer."
        "Ah, you do then!" her suitor murmured with bitterness.
        The bitterness touched her, and she cried out: "You're mistaken! I don't."
        He sat down on a bench, unceremoniously, doggedly, like a man in trouble; leaning his elbows on his knees and staring at the floor. "I can't even be glad of that," he said at last, throwing himself back against the wall; "for that would be an excuse."
        She raised her eyebrows in surprise. "An excuse? Must I excuse myself?"
        He paid, however, no answer to the question. Another idea had come into his head. "Is it my political opinions? Do you think I go too far?"
        "I can't object to your political opinions, because I don't understand them."
        "You don't care what I think!" he cried, getting up. "It's all the same to you."
        Isabel walked to the other side of the gallery, and stood there showing him her charming back, her light slim figure, the length of her white neck as she bent her head, and the density of her dark braids. She stopped in front of a small picture as if for the purpose of examining it; and there was something so young and free in her movement that her very pliancy seemed to mock at him. Her eyes, however, saw nothing; they had suddenly been suffused with tears. In a moment he followed her, and by this time she had brushed her tears away; but when she turned around her face was pale and the expression of her eyes strange. "That reason that I wouldn't tell you-I'll tell you after all. It's that I can't escape my fate."
        "Your fate?"
        "I should try to escape it if I were to marry you."
        "I don't understand. Why should not that be your fate as well as anything else?"
        "Because it's not," said Isabel femininely. "I know it's not. It's not my fate to give up-I know it can't be."
        Poor Lord Warburton stared, an interrogative point in either eye. "Do you call marrying me giving up?"
        "Not in the usual sense. It's getting -getting- getting a great deal. But it's giving up other chances."
        "Other chances for what?"
        "I don't mean to marry," said Isabel, her colour quickly coming back to her. And then she stopped, looking down with a deep frown, as if it were hopeless to attempt to make her meaning clear.
        "I don't think it presumptuous in me to suggest that you'll gain more than you'll lose," her companion observed.
        "I can't escape unhappiness," said Isabel. "In marrying you I shall be trying to."
        "I don't know whether you'd try to, but you certainly would: that I must in candour admit!" he exclaimed with an anxious laugh.
        "I musn't-I can't!" cried the girl.
        "Well, if you're bent on being miserable I don't see why you should make me so. Whatever charms a life of misery may have for you, it has none for me."
        "I'm not bent on a life of misery," said Isabel. "I've always been intensely determined to be happy, and I've often believed I should be. I've told people that; you can ask them. But it comes over me every now and then that I can never be happy in any extraordinary way; not by turning away, by separating myself."
        "By separating yourself from what?"
        "From life. From the usual chances and dangers, from what most people know and suffer."
        Lord Warburton broke into a smile that almost denoted hope. "Why, my dear Archer," he began to explain with the most considerate eagerness, "I don't offer you any exoneration from life or from any chances or dangers whatever. I wish I could, depend upon it I would! For what do you take me pray? Heaven help me, I'm not the Emperor of China! All I offer you is the chance of taking the common lot in a comfortable sort of way. The common lot? Why, I'm devoted to the common lot! Strike an alliance with me, and I promise you that you shall have plenty of it. You shall separate from nothing whatever-not even from your friend Miss Stackpole."
        "She'd never approve of it," said Isabel, trying to smile and take advantage of this side-issue; despising herself too, not a little, for doing so.
...
        After it, without rejoining Henrietta and Ralph, she retreated to her own room; in which apartment, before dinner, she was found by Mrs Touchett, who had stopped on her way to the saloon. "I may as well tell you," said that lady, "that your uncle has informed me of your relations with Lord Warburton."
        Isabel considered. "Relations? They're hardly relations. That's the strange part of it: he has seen me but three or four times."
        "Why did you tell your uncle rather than me?" Mrs Touchett dispassionately asked.
        Again the girl hesitated. "Because he knows Lord Warburton better."
        "Yes, but I know you better."
        "I'm not sure of that," said Isabel, smiling.
        "Neither am I, after all; especially when you give me that rather conceited look. One would think you were awfully pleased with yourself and had carried off a prize! I suppose that when you refuse an offer like Lord Warburton's it's because you expect to do something better."
        "Ah, my uncle didn't say that!" cried Isabel, smiling still.

04/08.

"Does she know you love her?"

"Of course." 
I paused. The obstacle seemed unreal to me.
"If you love her," I said, "you'll love somebody else someday."

- Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

Song Off #2

This Morning I Realised.

I hate Bob Dylan's voice.
So much.
It drones, and wanes and WAILS.
It ball-drags.
Like chalk on my soul.
Up and down and up and down and up and down again.
Screeching as I try to enjoy my morning smoke.
Up and down and up and down and up and down again.

I hate Bob Dylan's voice.

I hate it.

- My dear friend Lauren on a Monday morning

You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand.
 

- Margery Williams, The Velveteen Rabbit

Alice came to a fork in the road.  
"Which road do I take?" she asked.
"Where do you want to go?" responded the Cheshire cat.
"I don't know," Alice answered.
"Then," said the cat, "it doesn't matter."
 

- Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

The way the coffee cups clink against each other from the vibration of the microwave.

Postsecret.

Roygbiv.

Roy G. Biv is a mnemonic for the sequence of hues in the visible spectrum and in rainbows:

Red  Orange  Yellow  Green  Blue  Indigo  Violet

A rainbow spans a continuous spectrum of colours; and the distinct bands are an artifact of human colour vision. In Roy G. Biv, the colours are arranged in the order of decreasing wavelengths, with red being 650 nm* and violet being about 400 nm. The reverse VIBGYOR is used in many Commonwealth countries.

*A nanometer is a unit of length in the metric system, equal to one billionth of a metre. The nanometre is often used to express dimensions on the atomic scale: the diameter of a helium atom, for example, is about 0.1 nm, and that of a ribosome is about 20 nm. The nanometre is commonly used to specify the wavelength of electromagnetic radiation near the visible part of the spectrum: visible light, in particular, ranges from 400 to 700 nm.

Comic book writer Geoff Johns** created the idea of an Emotional Spectrum around "Roy G. Biv" for his Green Lantern comic series for DC Comics. Beginning with the central and most powerful colour of green, which is attached to willpower, he devised a sliding scale of emotional control, where the colours at the opposite ends of the spectrum, red (rage) and violet (love) are the most powerful and controlling over their users and their surroundings. Orange becomes the light of avarice (greed), yellow the colour of fear, blue is the light of hope, and indigo the personification of compassion. Each light has its corresponding Lantern Corps and power ring.

** Wiki tells us that Geoff Johns worked on The Flash and Superman.

Roy G. Biv was also a pseudonym for the evil mastermind behind the plot of Sam & Max Season One***.

***Sam & Max was mainly designed and written by a combination of Brendan Q. Ferguson, Steve Purcell and Dave Grossman****.

****Steve Purcell and Dave Grossman both worked at Lucas Arts during their adventure games era and Dave Grossman wrote and programmed The Secret of Monkey Island and Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge (together with Ron Gilbert and Tim Schafer****)*****. He later co-designed Day of the Tentacle. This is him at Comicon:

Dave Grossman > and/or = Guybrush Threepwood.

****Tim Schafer is best known as the designer - and it seems writer - of Full Throttle and Grim Fandango. 

******And so follows some of the classics from the Monkey Island series:

          Guybrush: At least I’ve learnt something from all of this.

Elaine: What’s that?

Guybrush: Never pay more than 20 bucks for a computer game.

Elaine: A what?

Guybrush: I don't know. I have no idea why I said that.

Barkeep: Guybrush? Is that a French name?

Guybrush: No, actually it’s a fictional name.

 [Looking through a keyhole]

           Guybrush Threepwood: I see a diorama of the children of the world living in peace
            and freedom. No, wait. It can't be that. It's just too dark to make out what's in there.

          Guybrush: How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?

Carpenter: A woodchuck would chuck no amount of wood since a woodchuck can’t chuck wood.

Guybrush: But if a woodchuck could chuck and would chuck some amount of wood, 

what amount of wood would a woodchuck chuck?

Carpenter: Even if a woodchuck could chuck wood and even if a woodchuck would

chuck wood, should a woodchuck chuck wood?

Guybrush: A woodchuck should chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood, as long as a

woodchuck would chuck wood.

Carpenter: Oh shut up.

Roygbiv is also a song by Boards of Canada on their album Music Has the Right to Children (1998). They're Scottish. Wikipedia says many of the songs on Music Has the Right to Children utilise a number of field recordings******* and intense sound manipulation.

*******Field recording is the term used for an audio recording produced outside of a recording studio. Field recording of natural sounds is called phonography. "Field recordings" may also refer to simple monaural or stereo recordings taken of musicians in familiar and casual surroundings.

Roygbiv (more accurately Bocuma / Roygbiv) also has an unofficial video attached to it. 

Disco Pop Onesie Wednesday.

19/07.

I would like to react. But for now I fear I am past that.

A little broken, a little sad. Relieved.

It will only get harder. Won’t it? It will. The emotional unravelling, how easy. How difficult is it to scream, to cry.

Now the awkward aftermath. Will you still need me tomorrow?

I fear the loss of my sanity.
I fear the loss of my faculties.
I fear the loss of my empathy.
I fear the loss of very few.

My headphones are on but I play no music. The white noise fills my ears. 
A certain reassurance, a cotton wool-like numbing.

I fear other people will speak and I will have to listen.
I fear hearing other people.

Stretches of beauty are waning and I can’t allow the chain to break or everything will be static and floating and empty.

I fear my timeline has left me behind.
I fear I have let my timeline leave me.
I fear I lay too much importance to rest in ridiculous things.

I am bored but not disinterested. There are things that will entertain but I am lazy now, I will not search them out. Temperamental but dispassionate, I cry too often only to blink unnervingly at what should frighten me the most.

I fear the itching around my eyes will never go away no matter how many cool fingers I press upon it.
I fear I allow my body to manifest its grief.
I fear I have no grief to compare to others.

I regret nothing but maybe I shouldn’t be here.

Decisions deserve not regret but second thoughts.

Meditations in an Emergency.

Am I to become profligate as if I were a blonde? Or religious as if I were French?

Each time my heart is broken it makes me feel more adventurous (and how the same names keep recurring on that interminable list!), but one of these days there’ll be nothing left with which to venture forth.

Why should I share you? Why don’t you get rid of someone else for a change?

I am the least difficult of men. All I want is boundless love.

Even trees understand me! Good heavens, I lie under them, too, don’t I? I’m just like a pile of leaves.

However, I have never clogged myself with the praises of pastoral life, nor with nostalgia for an innocent past of perverted acts in pastures. No. One need never leave the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes—I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there’s a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life. It is more important to affirm the least sincere; the clouds get enough attention as it is and even they continue to pass. Do they know what they’re missing? Uh huh.

My eyes are vague blue, like the sky, and change all the time; they are indiscriminate but fleeting, entirely specific and disloyal, so that no one trusts me. I am always looking away. Or again at something after it has given me up. It makes me restless and that makes me unhappy, but I cannot keep them still. If only I had grey, green, black, brown, yellow eyes; I would stay at home and do something. It’s not that I’m curious. On the contrary, I am bored but it’s my duty to be attentive, I am needed by things as the sky must be above the earth. And lately, so great has their anxiety become, I can spare myself little sleep.
 

Now there is only one man I love to kiss when he is unshaven. Heterosexuality! you are inexorably approaching. (How discourage her?)
 

St. Serapion, I wrap myself in the robes of your whiteness which is like midnight in Dostoevsky. How am I to become a legend, my dear? I’ve tried love, but that hides you in the bosom of another and I am always springing forth from it like the lotus—the ecstasy of always bursting forth! (but one must not be distracted by it!) or like a hyacinth, “to keep the filth of life away,” yes, there, even in the heart, where the filth is pumped in and slanders and pollutes and determines. I will my will, though I may become famous for a mysterious vacancy in that department, that greenhouse.
 

Destroy yourself, if you don’t know!
 

It is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so. I admire you, beloved, for the trap you’ve set. It's like a final chapter no one reads because the plot is over.

“Fanny Brown is run away—scampered off with a Cornet of Horse; I do love that little Minx, & hope She may be happy, tho’ She has vexed me by this Exploit a little too. —Poor silly Cecchina! or F:B: as we used to call her. —I wish She had a good Whipping and 10,000 pounds.” —Mrs. Thrale.

I’ve got to get out of here. I choose a piece of shawl and my dirtiest suntans. I’ll be back, I'll re-emerge, defeated, from the valley; you don’t want me to go where you go, so I go where you don’t want me to. It’s only afternoon, there’s a lot ahead. There won’t be any mail downstairs. Turning, I spit in the lock and the knob turns. 

Frank O'Hara 

After Mayakovsky.

It's after one. You're probably alone.
All night the moon rings like a telephone
in an empty booth above our separateness.
Now is the hour one answers. I am home.
Hello, my heart, my God, my President,
my darling: I'm alarmed by the alarm
clock's iridescent face, hung like a charm
from darkness's fat ear. This accident
that was my life will have its witnesses:
now, while the world lies wholly motionless
and sorry in a crapulence of stars,
now is the hour one rises to address
the ages and history and the universe:
I swear you'll never see my face again.

Denis Johnson

To Be Continued.

“Ah, Marjorie, you can’t use the grater for that!”
Marjorie, visibly exasperated, sighed more audibly than necessary.
“Then what, Diane? What can I use the grater for?”
“Cheese, Majorie, cheese.”
Her ‘e’s stretched.
“Or a stick of butter perhaps. Yes. A stick of butter.”
Marjorie could not believe.
“You have no imagination, Diane.”
“And you, Marjorie. You have too much.”
Marjorie chose not to reply, and instead let her focus drift to her surroundings, her left hand still with a relatively firm hold on the grater, her right holding the shell that she had been trying to grate. She had wanted to make ‘shellings’, like ‘shillings’, so she could go to the corner shop and try to buy a juicebox and when the assistant would refuse she could say, ‘but I have shellings – but with an accent on the e - real tender!’ and then she would laugh and laugh.
She had had better ideas.
“I want to go to Morocco, Diane. I want to see the people there.”
Marjorie did not let her focus drift from nothing.
“By all means, Marjorie. Just leave the grater.”
Diane was not listening but this was alright, as Marjorie was not speaking to her.
“Or maybe Eastern Europe.”
Marjorie mused, and absent-mindedly went back to scratching the conch shell down the side of the grater that had not the little holes, nor the littler ones, but the three lengthy slicers that she had not found a use for before.
“Mmm, it’s cold there.”
Diane’s back was turned. And she spoke too softly. So Marjorie spoke louder.
“WHAT'S THAT DIANE?”
“It’s cold there.”
Diane enunciated but hardly a fraction louder.
“It’s cold here.”
Diane turned then, to see Marjorie pout, idly dragging her little shell across the metal so that it made a ridiculously useless sound. She wore a light, short-sleeved blouse.
Diane went back to her onions.

I am in the wilderness

You are in the music, 

In the man's car next to me

Somewhere in my sadness,
I know I won't fall apart completely

A little Sade never hurt anybody.

Dogs.

You've got to be crazy, you gotta have a real need
You gotta sleep on your toes, and when you're on the street
You got to be able to pick out the easy meat with your eyes closed
And then moving in silently, down wind and out of sight
You gotta strike when the moment is right, without thinking

And after a while, you can work on points for style
Like the club tie, and the firm handshake
A certain look in the eye and an easy smile
You have to be trusted by the people that you lie to
So that when they turn their backs on you
You'll get the chance to put the knife in

You gotta keep one eye looking over your shoulder
You know, it's going to get harder, and harder and harder as you get older
Yeah, and in the end you'll pack up and fly down south
Hide your head in the sand
Just another sad old man
All alone and dying of cancer

And when you lose control, you'll reap the harvest you have sown
And as the fear grows, the bad blood slows and turns to stone
And it's too late to lose the weight you used to need to throw around
So have a good drown, as you go down all alone
Dragged down by the stone

Gotta admit that I'm a little bit confused
Sometimes it seems to me as if I'm just being used
Gotta stay awake, gotta try and shake off this creeping malaise
If I don't stand my own ground, how can I find my way out of this maze

Deaf, dumb and blind, you just keep on pretending
That everyone's expendable, and no one has a real friend
And it seems to you the thing to do would be to isolate the winner
Everything's done under the sun
But you believe at heart everyone's a killer

Who was born in a house full of pain
Who was trained not to spit in the fan
Who was told what to do by the man
Who was broken by trained personnel
Who was fitted with collar and chain
Who was given a pat on the back
Who was breaking away from the pack
Who was only a stranger at home
Who was ground down in the end
Who was found dead on the phone
Who was dragged down by the stone
Who was dragged down by the stone

Friday.

 

"...I realized that the one you were before, had changed into somebody for 

whom I wouldn't mind to put the kettle on"

Song Off #1

 

About Last Night.

Last night the city - the city, the city, monstrous and expansive, old and new and grey-like, not ours of course but you understand - was a wasteland. The streets lay strewn and empty. The one I was on, however, was full of the survivors of some unexplained catastrophe. White-Lies-frontman professed his interest, and perhaps love, for me in letter form and it was announced, without being announced. I caught sight of my reflection in the mirroring glass door near the snack table and realised that, mid-apocalypse, I had had the chance to get a wonderful new hipster haircut, and I wondered briefly why no one had commented. I walked the courtyarded wasteland that we had all taken refuge in, to find White-Lies-frontman and tell him I did not think it could work. I feared that if we started something now there would just be too much pressure with the upcoming struggles we would have to face. I did not tell him this but I did not want him burdened by me, for him to feel the need to protect me, if it came to any life or death situations - which it would - so soon in this 'relationship'. We were chilled though and I petted his grey, pointy-faced horse. Animals were particularly attracted to me and I ended up entwined in and with two long, silken-haired dogs, of which one was a cat. His friends commented and I laughed and took the fact that White-Lies-frontman was travelling in a graffiti-ed minibus with a bunch of 20-something skater bois with grace.

Things happened, and happened, and a lot else happened before this happened but when it did I rushed back into the courtyard to find White-Lies-frontman and I threw my arms around his neck from behind and I gasped out that I had made a mistake I had made a mistake. He held me and we were utterly connected, so much so that it would all be fine. But everything and everyone was moving and leaving because we had to, of course, because they were coming, and so I lost White-Lies-frontman as the pointy-faced horse began to rebel and went for me, chasing me around the courtyard backwards, enlisting the help of another horse friend, now both intent on kicking me with their hindlegs, frantically galloping crazily towards me; ass first, heads neighing, teeth bared and frothing from behind. I watched White-Lies-frontman being herded into his minibus by his friends, but he was waiting for me, he was making them wait, he would come, and I had to get to him, but I couldn't escape the horses, who wanted me dead it was decided. I had to jump and climb on top of a huge, old black tv - at least 2m by 2m - that was piled on top of other salvaged rubbish to get away. From above, I watched the graffiti-ed minibus pull a handbrake turn while blank humans insected around it.

I was outside of the courtyard then on the wide grey street and they were coming, of course they were and we could all feel it. It was my brother (his first appearance), an acquaintance from university, a blank ghostly figure who was feminine in nature and myself who stood staring at each other with horror as well as determination for a few seconds before the electronic band standing on a makeshift stage of black shapes next to us started up the song - the song, oh the prodigal song! - that forced us and let us beautifully sprint flat out down the street, while teachers - past and present as well as Stevie Nicks who was not Stevie Nicks but Orla who used to work at Universal Music, but actually a teacher of mine that I could not recognise - reached their demise in various, torturous ends, personally scripted to suit their fears. I saw these deaths first-hand. Stevie/Orla/Teacher/I was pushed into another, smaller courtyard, only to be confronted with hundreds of students, standing in a certain square-like grid, seemingly larger than her/her/her/me. Alarmed, glancing back to the gate we entered through she/she/she/I saw now only cement. She/she/she/I met our end, cowering, as students, all leering with quiet anticipation, one particularly frightening long-haired brunette, all picked up handfuls of the dark earth around them and started throwing it at her/her/her/my face until her/her/her/my eyesight and lung capacity was completely obscured by the black dirt. 

But I was still running, the pounding beats corresponding to my equally pounding steps. But we were only to be confronted by them - although I still had not seen them - coming around the corner of the massive city intersection. We turned back, found a staircase that led to the roof. A glorious find that my brother had led us to but he was now missing and I had lost the acquaintance, not that I was trying hard to keep her, so I was left with the blank feminine figure. We rushed up the stairs, and a small child halfway-up grabbed and grasped my hand in both of his and murmured prophetic negativity from under his hoodie, staring at me but not at me at all with wavering, large eyes. I listened and then ran, bursting out onto the fresh, clear air of the darkening night. The roof was an outlined rectangle, overlooking the now emptied courtyard and I felt fear for the first time. The roof was broken in parts and damp in others and it was a far way to a/the door on the other side. The child had somehow contacted others and I could tell they were coming. We didn't think, just ran, as lightly as I could, as deftly as I could, across the pockmarked rooftop, anxiety and black torn holes in the fabric of the fiberglass stopping me often. Large men rose from the surrounding roofs, sinister. They did not rush but were languid in their movements, and more frightening because. One to the right of me was deep and dark and was telling me that I will not get out, I will not survive, 'you will not make it, don't be silly girl, you will not make it'. I side-stepped him and a black gash in the roof as he went for me and finally got to the door on the other side. No relief, but then I wasn't expecting it, this was just where I had to go. A man waited for me behind the door and immediately all I knew was that I had to take him. I had to get to White-Lies-frontman, but also I knew he would come for me if he had to and I did not want him to leave where he was, where he was safe. So I picked up a broken piece of wooden scaffolding, I bent into tennis receiving and I mentally aligned, smacking the splintering wood into my left palm, ready to kill this demon with my bare hands.

And then my effing alarm went off.

Never been so bummed.

Never.

01 July 2011.

I just made a cup of Earl Grey at my office and when it was finished I perused it's slightly milky consistency. 

With a flourish I then wastefully took an English Breakfast bag and just dipped it in there. 

Dip dip dip. Dip dip dip. Until it was juuuuuust right.

And while grinning evil-y (a real word) to myself, I got a strong sense of pride and "sticking it to the man".

... I think I'm getting paid too little.       
               
                                                                              



A weekend song: