Thriller (two kinds)

and

crises/dilemmas

1. This doesn't look too good. I think I might be giving Truck a miss, or at least waiting until rather late in the day before heading down there.

2. Zoe Williams has written an article that reflects my own thoughts on a particular subject. I usully hate Zoe Williams, so does this mean that I am wrong? Has my moral and intellectual compass shifted? Have I always been wrong, or has she always been right? This has confused me.

Ubu is, as ever, a safe port in a storm.

adrift in the ether

I now have the internet in my room, and in my (rare) free moments have been working my way through Music With Roots in the Aether, as well as listening to Alice's dad's wonderfully strange music.

I promise that I will try and find time in the coming days to sort through the multitude of events that have been exploding around me the past two weeks. For my own benefit, if for no-one elses...

toontown

Thanks to James for this. I think a fair bit of my coming week will be spent sifting this site.

my heart is sore, my heart soars

As I go to pick up the milk from the doorstep this morning there is an odd collusion of events. As I collect my mail from the mat, there is a knock at the door. Funny, since I have a bell, but then again it hasn't been working too well this week. I check the mail and find that there is something from E., which immediately has me grinning like a village idiot. Then I open the door and there is P., standing there in the rain handing me back a bag full of my stuff.

The girl on the step, the letter in my hand, the rain: what does this moment mean?

For a moment I am in a movie of my own life into which some hack writer has chosen to plot this corny 'poignant' coincidence. What else could it mean? Here is THE girl, the one I thought was THE one, handing me a bag of my things in a final, symbolic gesture: the End of the Affair. And all I want to do is get inside and open up the package in my hand. This person who drove me to the edge of despair, who upended my reason in a near-cataclysmic amour fou seems so insignificant now in relation to all that this envelope promises. I mumble thanks and excuse myself, not forgetting to make the perfunctory enquiry about my missing snare drum.

Can a heart really be that fickle? Was all that I felt over those miserable months even real? If so, is the way my heart feels now just as empty, superficial? Just what exactly is it that I should be feeling?

Whatever happens next in this absurd movie there will at least be a great soundtrack, courtesy of the CD in the package, though I think that this will have to be the theme song.

twenty hours with Miss McConnell

I zoot home early last night from the woefully underattended (and really rather dreary) Wes Anderson Party. Helen, just back from London, awaits me on the steps along with her boyfriend Darren. He saunters, we go inside and a few moments later are joined by Tom and Sarah.

Wine. Cheese. Scrabble.

More wine. Apple crumble. Jimmy Stewart.

Tom and Sarah head off, leaving me and Helen to sit drinking Cocoa and admire the pluck of the two mice who have taken a shine to my kitchen. Suddenly it is 4am and rather than chase Helen into the cold night I offer her the spare room.

The following day brings rain, and so we end up mooching about the flat eating - scrambled eggs, cheese, lentil soup - and drinking a handsome amount of tea. Entertainment comes in the form of classic children's TV (Clangers, Trumpton, Herbs) and Jan Svankmajer's 'Alice'.

Saturdays rarely get better than this. Thanks Helen.

Whither now for cheap CDs?

So long then Fopp.

How will I complete my Sonic Youth collection on the cheap now?

maundering

I should be at the Cube working now - instead I am chain-viewing old cartoons:



In the past two nights I have eaten apple crumble, smoked apple tobacco and drunk too much cider. How d'ya like them apples?

Eat the watermelon, spit out the seeds

Phil:

"For nations vague as weed,
For nomads among stones,
Small-statured cross-faced tribes
And cobble-close families
In mill-towns on dark mornings
Life is slow dying.So are their separate ways
Of building, benediction,
Measuring love and money
Ways of slow dying.
The day spent hunting pig
Or holding a garden-party,Hours giving evidence
Or birth, advance
On death equally slowly.
And saying so to some
Means nothing; others it leaves
Nothing to be said."

- Phillip Larkin, "The Whitsun Weddings"

Eric:

"All who have passed the age of thirty are joyless grotesques, endlessly fussing about things of no importance and staying alive without, so far as the child can see, having anything to live for. Only child life is real life. The schoolmaster who imagines he is loved and trusted by his boys is in fact mimicked and laughed at behind his back. An adult who does not seem dangerous nearly always seems ridiculous."

- George Orwell, "Such, Such Were the Joys"

Scrumped some raspberries this afternoon. Nothing more to be said.