classification.

last week i found myself visiting a rather cheerless catholic hospital. there is nothing wrong with catholics, as long as they stay out of my field of view, douse themselves with chloroform and don’t use up too much of our valuable oxygen.

anyway, it wouldn’t be good to find yourself hospitalised there if you were in need of euthanasia, because they wouldn’t ‘kill one of god’s beloved children’ till hell freezes over. they would probably keep you alive for as long as they could, and use you as a guinea pig in the name of charity and moral scientific progress. however, if you happened to look foreign or have an arab name, quite the opposite would happen.

i’ve heard an ex-nurse there saying they let islamic(-looking) people wait unreasonably long at a&e, i.e. refuse help, which isn’t all that christian, and hard to believe, until you actually get inside and see for yourself, that is. there were quite a few presumable moroccans in the ward i visited, not that their precise ethnic origins matter, though. they were, horresco referens, foreign, and seemed to pay for that in cash when in contact with the rather fascist-looking nurses. the treatment i witnessed fell far short of ‘respectful’; if you’re the kind of masochist who likes ugly white women hatefully glancing at you constantly and spitefully murmuring below their breath, though, you’d probably have a pleasant stay.

one would wonder how people in public service dare to pull this off, but of course, surprisingly many among the lower 75% are racists and/or fascists these days, so i guess they should have a lot of support from, well, their fellow marginals. it was all shocking enough, however: a hospital’s primary function should be treating and helping the ill (even if this particular hospital has been ‘wrong’ since 1945), not making those ill feel even less well with verbal abuse and suggestive behaviour.

then again, people seem to need an ‘enemy’ more than anything else. that dark horse used to be zionism, has become islam, and… maybe one day it will be petty lower-middle class fascists. it’s not very likely anyone will point to such hopeless, ridiculous and insignificant people as the cause of all evil in society, though, but thrashing their awful, despicable houses would still be nice.

a worrying thing.

tonight, dear reader, your favourite blogger has finished reading an absolutely awful ethnomusicological book about chinese musique concrete. there is nothing even remotely interesting about chinese musique concrete, so it shall remain a mystery how the kraut lesbo author managed to write 400 pages’ worth of pseudo-intellectual ranting about it.

there also isn’t anything even remotely interesting about me, which is far worse in the grand scheme of things. nothing ever happens, and the nothingness of these recent months makes me think that, perhaps, nothing ever really happened in the past either. was i ever happy? was i ever ’so happy together’ with someone? was my life once, if not exciting, at least moderately appealing?

in the end, though, these questions are not of grand importance either. some say all we have is now, and i’d politely advise them to get out of my sight before hell breaks loose. some say all we have is the past, but the past is just that, and maybe i have already spent too much time with blurring visions of how things, possibly, once used to be, of how i used to live.

so if we don’t take the past into account and evaluate the present for what it is (an endless succession of ‘now’s that never really come to be), we are left with the assumption that all we have is, indeed, the future. and that, dear reader, is a worrying thing.

i somehow do not think there will be much of a future to enjoy for me. the likelihood of things staying the way they are is astronomically high, which is better than, say, having to herd cows in the darfur flatlands for a living, but still incrementally worse than other people’s lives and, consequently, fates.

i do not see what could change the way things are right now; i do not see how i am going to keep myself from going really insane (not the milquetoast insanity of last autumn, that might well just have been a teaser for things yet to come); i do not see what could stop me from becoming a spinster; i do not see how i could ever keep any job that goes beyond cauliflower quality control at a dinky, albanian-run entrepot in darkest norfolk; and, worst of all, i do not see how i can do anything about all these inevitable, stone-cast certainties anymore.

i probably could have turned things around a while ago; it might still have been possible around october or november, but now, dear reader, it is much too late. so, take my hand and off we stride, sha la la. i’m a girl and you’re a boy, sha la la la la. the rest of ’sheila take a bow’ is much too painful to write down here, and i’m not going to find the one i love (and he’ll love me-e-e-e) by going out, if at all.

oh, things have undoubtedly been worse. but when things were worse i usually wasn’t resigned to the course of events. the whole situation might not look bad on the surface, but if i was less well-raised and inhibited, and would show real emotions, you’d carry me off to the museum edvard munch’s the scream was stolen from, greedy for rewards and all, before i could say ‘i think i’m going to stay monumentally depressed for the rest of my life’.

***

wouldn’t it be ironic if i went insane right after writing the first half-decent nouveau roman about a flemish suburban spinster going bonkers? it’s exactly the kind of laughable, pathetic coincidence that would have a chance to happen in real life.

 

psychocandy by david shrigley.

“only love can pull you through
the way you have been feeling
but there is no love
there is just interior design
and furniture.”

doom and gloom and dirges.

it’s easy to see why some like their opiates served up in church (naive), others get obsessed with money and a ‘career’ (loathsome), and others still turn to family life (ill-advised). i myself fancy real opiates, but anyway…

our collective insignificance is just so overwhelming. there is nothing to be gained by going down this road, i know, and i should turn back at once, i know that too; but what i don’t know is what i’m still doing here when i’m not even… not even moderately amused or pleased by it all.

once upon a time, in a long-gone land far from the western european seaboard, anyone who wanted to ponder about the meaning of life was cordially invited to perch him-/herself on top of a handsome, tall pillar for the remainder of his/her existence, and start pondering away. in return, the locals would assure a steady stream of cakes and tea (or rather olives and retsina wine, this is the byzantine empire we’re talking about).

now this sounds alluring. why should one still get out of bed each morning, try to dress agreeably, try to be friendly to a rather large collection of asinine, inane strangers over the course of that very day, try not to be too tired after a day at the university and try to spend the evening in a nice enough way? why? i don’t see why, really. is there really anything gained by going down this socially condoned road? anything lasting?

i would rather not spend my energy pointlessly and instead devote my life to… em. building a handsome, old-fashioned, doric column? check! reading the collected works of rosamond lehmann and her literary school of 1920s spinsters on top of the pillar i wrought with my own hands? check! gazing down contemptuously on the very villagers who provide me with frangipane cakes and earl grey tea? check!

the road to insanity is steep and slippery, and i seem to have a bobsled. i can’t even seem to describe this dreaded feeling of insignificance that makes me want to pursue a, hopefully fruitful, career in the noble building trade. ta for now, dear reader. i’m going to pretend it’s 1920. laudanum is still sold over the counter and the twenty-first century was just a hysterical nightmare i once had (tres david mitchell, that).
.

all things bright and beautiful.

exams finished and all. i think they were a complete disaster, but then again, the last time i thought i did even remotely well at anything was probably in 1997.

so, your hero is feeling the heat of his seemingly perpetual depression again. i am waiting for a force majeure to come crashing in; a nuclear holocaust would be particularly welcome.

it’s a pity there aren’t any square-jawed soviets sitting in front of dangerous-looking red buttons and those odd, flimsy computers the communist bloc had around anymore. right now life would seem somewhat more tolerable if there was a fair possibility of it being abruptly ended by something out of a glum, run-down siberian silo.

oh well. foucault said it, and said it well: il y a des moments dans la vie où la question de savoir si on peut penser autrement qu’on ne pense et percevoir autrement qu’on ne voit est indispensable pour continuer à regarder ou à réfléchir… and this is definitely one of those. (la question est bien celle-ci: si bien je pouvais penser autrement que je ne pense, cher michel, et ce soit honteux qu’on aura jamais une quelconque réponse, ou bien qu’elle me parviendrait trop tard de toute facon.)

a portrait of a web 2.0 child wrapped up in jackets:

i shall leave you, for now, with these sybilline words. hopefully they mean more to you than they do to me (that is, not one iota). i might quite possibly need… some sleep and a bit less doom and gloom.

on writing.

there is nothing more frustrating than competence in the wrong places. yes, i have finished writing my masterful concoction, bondage for dummies. but, yes, i have also made a very big mistake: letting my mother read it in its dazzling entirety.

the old girl is in a total flurry, and writing her next novel, the antagonist. i got my hands on its prologue, and ‘the antagonist’’s character copies liesbeth van innis’ character trait for trait. now that wouldn’t be such a problem if the antagonist’s storyline wasn’t EFFING FANTASTIC. i keep slapping myself and moaning about why on earth i didn’t come up with that idea (god knows i could’ve, everyone could’ve, you could’ve for all i know).

if that isn’t a sign of a good story to come, i don’t know what is, really. trouble in sc-land! all i do is sit with a fan in my face and drink bloody marys all day, thinking of the awful truth: my own mother is writing a novel that is at once similar to mine, and far superior to it. if i wasn’t drunk (and amazed by the current course of events) all the time, i’d come up with a cunning, liesbeth-like plan to burn her notes, magnetize her hard drive and get that whole antagonist over with.

DESPAIR, OH, DESPAIR!

suffer little children.

so, yesterday i went to radio soulwax-mas. the music was alright (erol alkan and boys noize were particularly exciting, and zombie nation made interesting layered collages of grooves, drones and noises), but the venue was way too big and looked like a decrepit soviet nuclear command centre, and… there were loads of 16 yos.

all they did was drink tons of beer and look youthful with those shiny faces of theirs. i think i’ve come to the point where i have to accept that i’m young, but not for all that long anymore. i felt like slapping them and yelling ‘DO SOMETHING WITH YOUR YOUTH, DO SOMETHING BEFORE YOU’RE A FAT FUCKING LOSER BEING HUMILIATED BY SOME FAT LOSER HUSBAND ON REALITY TV, FOR THE GAWPING AMUSEMENT OF OTHER FAT LOSERS JUST LIKE YOU.’

then i realised i never did anything notable with my own youth either, so i just let it slip by and watched scores of perfect-looking, radiant teenagers puke. they looked at us like we were mammoths, new arrivals from the siberian permafrost. i hadn’t seen that many teenagers huddled together since i was a teenager myself, so it was really quite a shock. children are different, though. they’re clean slates and possibilities waiting to happen. teenagers are more… fully-formed.

apart from that, it was quite fun.

the self-loathing simon.

after an evening of raclette cheese and german spirits i refused to get up this morning, and here i am, huddled up in bed. oh, how i hate myself! i’m the human equivalent of an african elephant, minus the pretty ivory and cool noises. oh, how did it ever get this far! i should be studying korean, but all i do is wallow in my misery.

hm, business as usual, isn’t it. i know it all sounds a bit too dramatic, but half of the time i just want to stay in bed, listen to nico or beach house, smoke a pack of gauloises (or some ‘indian cigarettes’) and scream inside.