what are we trying to heal, anyway?

things that have happened this afternoon

Gaby made me a cd with a startling array of classics on it. Lots and lots. So I'm in my room dancing to Madonna (hey Mr. DJ put a record on, etc. etc.) and then the song finishes so I play it again and then the song finishes so I play it again and so on and then the song finishes and I play it again and I hear a voice from a neighbouring house say 'FUCKING Madonna AGAIN.' So I switched it off and I am now terrified of leaving the house.

Went to a real swell lecture. Spent most of it pretending I was married to the lecturer. No no not married to him because we all know I pretend I'm married to EVERYone cos I fall in love EVERYday and I don't really wanna put him in that. We should say I was pretending I'm his best friend. He's lovely.

In the house we drew Secret Santa and for our fancy dress I got christmas pudding so now I have to dress up as a fucking christmas pudding. I look like one all the time anyway. So unfair. SO disgusting.

I got really excited about the English Christmas ball even though it's stupid and I want to hate it because of the very nature of going to a fucking BALL for Chrissakes but it sounds so niiiiiice and I'm so exciiiiiiiited and I'm gonna spend every day from now until then practicing impressive flicks with eyeshadow. You know it's gonna happen.

Started reading The Secret History again... have got to read it for school but it doesn't feel like work even though it is work and I worked out that if I read it at 2 minutes a page it's gonna take me 16 hours to read which is STUPID because I have a presentation on it on Monday and I'm going away this WEEKEND but what the fuck I'll do it. I'm steadily falling for one of the characters. Henry Winter. He's kind of a cliché but when has that ever bothered me. 


Really love this book. It's just nuts how good it is. I wish I was in it. This is what the back reads:


'Under the influence of their charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at an elite New England college discover a way of thinking and living that is a world away from the humdrum existence of their contemporaries. But when they go beyond the boundaries of normal morality their lives are changed profoundly and for ever.'


And OH! do they go beyond the boundaries of normal morality or WHAT. Let me TELL you. 


This is what the teacher says to the protag. when they're in his office. It's what I think about a lot doing an English degree: 'Work?' he said to me once, astonished, when I referred to our classroom activities as such. 'Do you really think that what we do is work?' 
'What else should I call it?'
'I should call it the most glorious kind of play.' 


And here is the first we see of Henry - 
'Two of the boys wore glasses, curiously enough the same kind: tiny, old fashioned, with round steel rims. The larger of the two - and he was quite large, well over six feet - was dark-haired, with a square jaw and coarse, pale skin. He might have been handsome had his features been less set, or his eyes, behind the glasses, less expressionless and blank. He wore dark English suits and carried an umbrella (a bizarre sight in Hampden) and he walked stiffly through the throngs of hippies and beatniks and preppies and punks with the self-conscious formality of an old ballerina, surprising in one so large as he.' 


Sorry to be embarrassing and talk about my course. Anyway. He's fit. 

'I have to be leaving, but I won't let that come between us, okay?'

'Okay.'

Subway Face

That I have been looking

For you all my life
Does not matter to you.
You do not know.

You never knew.
Nor did I.
Now you take the Harlem train uptown;
I take a local down.

Langston Hughes

A clock without hands.

today

This post is dedicated to Nightjar who I like to think shares my love of example (maybe I forced it on her so what everyone's doing it). Please show Amy her picture in pride of place on my wall and also give her all my thanks. Love love love.

 Yeah I'm still obsessed with example ok I'm really sorry ok.

Great book

Context is everything. Dress me up and see. I'm a carnival barker, an auctioneer, a downtown performance artist, a speaker in tongues, a senator drunk on filibuster. I've got Tourette's. My mouth won't quit, though mostly I whisper or subvocalize like I'm reading aloud, my Adam's apple bobbing, jaw muscle beating like a miniature heart under my cheek, the noise suppressed, the words escaping silently, mere ghosts of themselves, husks of empty breath and tone. (If I were a Dick Tracy villain, I'd have to be Mumbles.) In this diminished form the words rush out of the cornucopia of my brain to course over the surface of the world, tickling reality like fingers on piano keys. Caressing, nudging. They're an invisible army on a peacekeeping mission, a peaceable horde. They mean no harm. They placate, interpret, massage. Everywhere they're smoothing down imperfections, putting hairs in place, putting ducks in a row, replacing divots. Counting and polishing the silver. Patting old ladies gently on the behind, eliciting a giggle. Only - here's the rub - when they find too much perfection, when the surface is already buffed smooth, the ducks already orderly, the old ladies complacent, then my little army rebels, breaks into the stores. Reality needs a prick here and there, the carpet needs a flaw. My words begin plucking at threads nervously, seeking purchase, a weak point, a vulnerable ear. That's when it comes, the urge to shout in church, the nursery, the crowded movie house. It's an itch at first. Inconsequential. But that itch is soon a torrent behind a straining dam. Noah's flood. That itch is my whole life. Here it comes now. Cover your ears. Build an ark.
Eat me! I scream.

What does your art save?
What does your art serve?
What does your art conserve?
What does your art convey?
What does your art convince?
What does your art confirm?
What does your art affirm?
To Whom does your art ascend?
What does your art pretend?
How does your art blend?
What does your art bend?
Whom does your art defend?
What does your art detail?
What does your art entail?
What does your art entitle?
Whom does your art excite?
What does your art expect?
To whom does your art pander?
On whom does your art depend?
What does your art suspend?
What does your art suffer?
What does your art offer?
Whom does your art offend?
To Whom does your art attend?
What does your art attack?
What nut does your art crack?
What does your art crave?
Who does your art save?

Here is my mum looking reem de la REEM. 

Me and Tasha  

The view from my basement bedroom. Glorious. 

PAPA FALC

What a schizophrenic wrote what I read

Smug 

 Magritte 

LOOK AT THEM THOUGH

REN + STIMPY ARE YOU MESSIN

That's me and Alice in the library. You know when you're laughing so hard you snort and people look and they think you've died because you are lying with your head on the desk not moving just snorting into your arms? Ohhhhhhh

Maz McCraz being delicious

And here’s some poetry because that’s what it’s all about really isn’t it. This guy is great. Just found him on youtube because I can’t really read poetry without listening to it because it just fucks my mind up and I always get it WRONG and I’m not very good at pacing the reading and it’s just better when you can hear it

 

HUMANITY i love you because when you're hard up you pawn your intelligence to buy a drink

in my entire life i have never found anything charming

I have no pride - no pride, no name, no face, no country. I don’t belong anywhere. Too sad, too sad... It doesn’t matter, there I am, like one of those straws which floats round the edge of a whirlpool and is gradually sucked into the centre, the dead centre, where everything is stagnant, everything is calm. All this time I am reading the menu over and over again.

potential poem titles

look how far away my face is

i feel bad

i'm going to take a bath in 13 gallons of warm coffee

'tired of life'

i want to murder everyone on the planet with pillows and then lay down on my bed

i feel insecure about my face

i want to murder the ocean

i want to sleep on a zebra while it gets eaten by a lion

can i stab large animals

i wish my face was a giant floating emoticon

today i empathized with the top of a tower

very important post

Doctors estimate that seventy to eighty percent of their business is non-health-related. People aren't sick, they're self-dramatising. Sometimes the hardest part of a medical job is keeping a straight face. As Jerry Seinfeld observed of his twenty years of dating: "That's a lot of acting fascinated."

    The acquisition of a condition lends significance to one's existence. An illness, a cross to bear... Some people go from condition to condition; they cure one, and another pops up to take its place. The condition becomes a work of art in itself, a shadow version of the real creative act the victim is avoiding by expending so much care cultivating his condition. 

    A victim act is a form of passive aggression. It seeks to achieve gratification not by honest work or a contribution made out of one's experience or insight or love, but by the manipulation of others through silent (and not-so-silent) threat. The victim compels others to come to his rescue or to behave as he wishes by holding them hostage to the prospect of his own further illness/ meltdown/ mental dissolution, or simply by threatening to make their lives so miserable that they do what he wants. 

    Casting yourself as a victim is the antithesis of doing your work. Don't do it. If you're doing it, stop.

all of a sudden they were upon us in the crowd. they were fit. i don't know what else to say. 

was working the other day (shock shock) and this was just casually in the kitchen. dreamy.