Godammit

Hollywood star, Gillian Anderson, plays an FBI agent on TV.

Paraphrase of Josh Joplin quoting Phil Ochs:

At times like these, sometimes the most revolutionary act can be to turn our backs and attempt to create something beautiful

I've been through all of this with you before. I am tired of the pessimism. My mother was the queen of ruined holidays. My father the king of mellow. Eat your goddamn chocolate. Have your Christmas crackers and pudding. Play God Save the Queen at top volume on the hi-fi and pretend that your country is still the steward of the language. Godammit I am going to enjoy the holiday this year, come hell or high water.

I would steal your keys at a bar, you kindly spoken pansy boy, and run as fast as I could into the streets of that town. I'd take the hell, and highwater, the fifths of bourbon on the way, and a couple of chocolates just for myself. I'd run in and out of movie theaters like I was Bruce Willis, you asshole. And I really am. You may not recognize me, but you have seen my movies....

But alas, tonight, for once, I have faith in the world. It came in the singing of Closer to Fine, a song I thought I had given up some 10 years ago. A taburnacular resonating of sweet chords that were familiar and strong and strange. All bosses gone, and a night of semi-abandon. And all I can say is I love you all.

War on Iraq be damned, and why do we always send our boys in during the holidays. I imagine my unborn child asking me, how can it be Christmas, some delightful day, when a forward deployment is not underway in December. Please, make my cost per gallon $4.84 if it will save a life, Mr. President. And I will stop tomorrow helping to sign youngins up for the 'war effort'. Please take my name off of your list, and your list too. I have nothing I need to buy, or sell, or advertise anymore... kickboxing is not an option.

Anyway, I have faith, and there is beauty, and there is John Lennon, alive or dead, so I will give something back to your country, and a couple of more things. Happy Christmas, war is over, or imminent as we like to say. I'd like to make it very clear that I want to have zero part.

As FBI file is expanding, I should probably stop writing here. Peace.

Humbug

I'm opting out. I'm opting out of everything: capitalism, relationships, social conformity, the legal system, fashion and especially Christmas.

I do not want to take part, thank you very much. I don't want to traipse around town looking for gifts that will be under-appreciated and consigned to the we'll-find-some-use-for-it-but-for-now-we'll-hide-it-under-the-bed pile. I don't want to write any Christmas cards - but I'll have to. For God's sake, I'm an atheist!
I do want to drink to excess and tell my parents things I would never tell them when sober. And I do want to see those friends I haven't seen for six months. I do want to eat the turkey and all that chocolate. I don't want the have-you-got-a-girlfriend conversations with distant relatives. Please don't make me go through another Christmas.

Next year I'm going to rent a cottage in the middle of nowhere. It'll just be me and the television and bottle of the strong stuff. I'll wake up at noon to a big cup of coffee with croissants, then slam a Marks & Sparks' Christmas dinner for one in the oven. After I've eaten, I'll go for a long walk in the rolling hills to clear my head before heading to the pub for a booze-up with total strangers, who I'll invite back to the cottage for a knees-up. We'll drink so much that we decide to go skinny dipping in the freezing-cold local stream (beck), but collapse in a heap before we manage to get so much as our socks off.
The next day, I won't remember any of their names and they won't remember mine, because that's the way we prefer it.

Do have a happy Christmas, just don't expect me to join in.

Guilt?

Despite the years of therapy, Doris still felt tremendous guilt when clandestinely eating chocolate.

I was walking to the local shops the other day - a journey of two minutes - to buy bread or fresh chicken for a curry, or possibly I needed batteries for my front bike-light, I don’t remember. I’d just rounded the corner by the post office when I was overcome by a pervading paralysis. It’s happened to me before and on many occasions. It starts in the heart with a jolt - the kind of sinking feeling you get when you realise you’ve locked your keys in the house or forgotten to feed your neighbour’s cat for the third day running - and spreads to the stomach; then comes the dizzying swirl of blood in the head and the accompanying prickly flush to the skin. It’s very debilitating. I’m sure that passers-by can see my cringing posture: my limbs tensed and my face contorted into some comic semi-rictus. Sometimes I might be standing at the bus stop waiting for a number 3 or 4 to take me to town; I could be loading the dryer with freshly laundered underwear, or I could be doling out alms to the local homeless. No matter what I might be doing at the time, I’m feeling guilty.

I’m always feeling guilty. But I don’t bear the great burden of a monstrous crime or a malicious wrongdoing. I have not embezzled an old lady out of her life savings or tortured a defenceless animal in the name of sport. I have not abdicated my responsibilities and abandoned an impregnated lover to face the world alone. I should be guilt-free, but I’m not.

I’m feeling guilty now: quite by chance I bumped into a long-lost university friend who is now living a few miles out of town. We went for a coffee and caught up on the events of the intervening years and agreed that we should keep in contact.

He called last Wednesday to see if I’d to go to the Tracy Emin exhibition that’s heralding the re-opening of the newly refurbished modern art gallery in town. I told him to call me Saturday morning to arrange a time we could both go. Well, he did call, but I was still languishing naked in bed and suggested that we make a date for Sunday. His voice took on a distinct air of disappointment as he offered an alternative mid-week visit. I realise now that he had taken it as understood that we would go today and, that in effect, I had stood him up. I feel guilty.

The primary causes of my guilt are, like this example, simple faux pars and social ineptitudes or, less regularly, things I did or said years ago and would never say or do today.

Why do I still feel guilty to this day about not contacting a friend when I went home to visit my parents last Christmas because I was feeling to ill, or not remembering a family birthday five years ago? I don’t feel guilty about my attempts to cremate a friend’s houseplant with the aid of a cigarette lighter and a can of deodorant at a rather drunken party. So why should I still worry about the hurtful things I might have said in the throes of an acrimonious break-up? I should be able to let it go – other people do.

While others seemingly go through life without any outward sense of conscience, I endure woeful regret at the most innocuous details of everyday life. Am I neurotic?

But I had a terrible realisation this afternoon: maybe I don’t feel guilty, maybe I feel embarrassed. Now that’s an altogether different emotion.

Lips

Tissues asked for by the afflicted may be found in boxes of this sort.

Winter has finally arrived here in the United Kingdom. As a smoker of hand-rolled cigarettes, the main hazard this most dismal of British seasons presents to me is the increased likelyhood of the rolling paper fusing itself to the lower lip. There is no way of knowing that this has happened until it is far too late. That is to say, one only becomes aware of adhesion when the cigarette has been removed from the mouth along with a sizeable square of skin and a minor, yet still alarming, amount of blood.

Don't be mistaken in thinking that the cigarette has actually been frozen to the lip - the winters in Britain rarely get so cold as to freeze bodily fluids. No, it's the paucity of lubricating saliva associated with this time of year that causes paper to bond with labial skin.
The only methods I know to avoid such an injury are: i) to keep the lips moist while smoking, which can promote chapping and render the cigarette damp and unsmokeable; or ii) to refrain from smoking while outdoors - not an option to a true nicotine devotee on his way home from the pub.

So if you see bloodied cigarette stubs in the gutter, or notice bohemian types with bleeding lips, you'll know the cause. All we ask is sympathy and maybe a tissue to staunch the flow.

Patio Umbrella

A yellow umbrella.

My patio umbrella is exactly the right size. The bar-style table that rests underneath is a circumfrence that allows for just enough coverage that on rainy nights like tonight I can go out, barefoot, onto the porch, and have a cigarette, without wetting my shoulders, or really getting my feet wet. I can walk out the back door and to the shelter of the vinyl yellow thrift store ($9) umbrella and it will shelter me from the storm for the duration of one Winston Light.

It's relatively cold tonight here in Atlanta, and raining. I've spent my night delivering a CD demo of a friend's band to the friend of that friend, with a stop at the Chik-Fil-A in between- a guy that doesn't seem to understand men hugging by his response to my approach on the front porch of his MTV Cribs style home.

A cordial glass of wine was shared and then a tour of this $400 thousand or so McMansion in a nondescript neighborhood, but still "inside the loop" as we like to say here, culminating in a 30 minute observation of the proprietors prowess at playing Grand Theft Auto on his Playstation 2.

The house is in the process of having a severl thousand dollar sound system installed. One in which every room will have speakers and separate volume controls, all installed on barter by some guys he (did I mention he's a lawyer) is defending in a drug possession case. The reason for delivering the CD is that this guys is someone who "knows" some folks in the industry and the friend, who this guy is a friend of, thinks that this may help us out in the long run. The other reason is so we could listen to the CD, or CD-R, as it really is on the "big system". Otherwise I would have mailed the thing.

Upon arriving and being greeted with the awkward hug, we went into to awkward greetings from some other folks in the house. (They always seem to be hanging around on Cribs as well.) We then placed the CD-R into the DVD player as it was the only piece of electronics he had hooked to the new system. it wouldn't play. Despite some negotiation and elbowing the thing a la Sir Arthur Fonzarelli, the thing still would not play. We left it for a moment and got back to the wine and some conversation, and then the proprietor of McMansion took the CD into a neighboring room, where there was a alarm clock radio capable of playing CDs, and he inserted the CD, pressed play and turned the thing to 11. Needless to say this was not the finest performance that I had ever heard of the band on the CD. In fact, I can't imagine any CD sounding good under such circumstances save early Napalm Death records (which to be honest, will sound the same on any system at any volume).

We listened for a couple of songs and then al present were obviously a little uninterested with the recording, especially played in the way it was. I said my pleasnt good-byes etc. and got in my car to head back home.

Upon arriving, I was immediately at ease in my little place, roughly one quarter the size of the lawyer's home. My house does not have speakers throughout, nor volume controls. It does have a CD player, and a DVD player as a matter of fact. I have a couch with a broken leg propped up on copies of Communication Arts (yuppie cinder blocks), and I do have $9 yellow vinyl patio umbrella on my back porch that is just the right size. And that is where I headed.

Late Night Phone Calls

A whale bone not unlike the one in my recurring dream.

I guess there comes a time in every person's life in which you find yourself with no friends to call after midnight. I mean, I've got friends that live from coast to coast, and some even in farther lands, that will not answer the phone at 2 AM. I guess I need some friends in southeast asian islands, because that seems where my internal time zone is firmly planted in recent weeks. Asian whorehouses and guys dealing contraband western CDs and shit like that. I don't really know what the deal is, but I just can't seem to get a good night's sleep even though I work a 9-to-5. Just as everyone else has start to spill back in from the streets of this lonely city, I seem ready to spill out. I make a call at 11 PM that keeps me in for awhile, but sooner or later those with kids and the wife and the dog, and 12 cats have to go to bed. There's way too many mouths to feed in the morning, and for me it's just the one, and I probably don't feed it near enough, even though my gut might tell a different story.

I guess even as I have grown up, I haven't really grown up too much. I rail against the bed and bath still. I do like feeling rested, and the clean feeling after bathing, it's just the process that gets me down. Kind of like eating as of late as well. I like not being hungry, but the food finding and the consequent eating just doesn't seem to appeal.

My therapist keeps telling me that these are all things that point toward a deep depression. He's really a brilliant guy. I think he has read at least half of the books on the Self-Help Psychology shelf at the local Barnes & Noble. He even wrote a book about adolescent angst and depression entitled Mommy? Are You Listening to Me, Mommy?: Adolescent Angst & Depression, in which he goes into great detail about how most of the deviant behavior of children these days points to an underlying "angst and depression" that the contemporary adolescent feels, and that in turn points to the common feelings of abandonment that said adolescent feels upon beginning the transition into young adulthood. I haven't read the book yet (all of the above was derived from reading the flap as I fell asleep one night) but I will just as soon as I have read Ulysses, the Bible and Don Quixote from cover to cover again. I am sure it really is an outstanding book, but back to the point.

My therapist says that my problems with growing up point to a depression (I am taking the medication in case you reading this, guy!), and I believe he is right because every time I make a call at 2AM and don't get an answer, or even worse, get a groggy response on the other end, I do indeed fall into a depression that keeps me up for a while pondering all of the little things about myself that I don't like, and reassuring myself that they are indeed issues by the fact that no body wants to talk to me. Everything from belly button lint to toenail fungus come under the mental knife. I lay awake listening to the morning birds, spanish speaking voices arriving on the job site next door, the sounds of cars cranking to warm and thaw the frost... the city coming to life. Then, and only then, do I drift off to dream the recurring dream of a whale bone descending.