20 February 2002
My right foot - there isn't much to say about it today. It's the more interesting of my two feet, because of events of the last couple of weeks. A possible contagion of athlete's foot threatened. My fourth toe was sore and red; this was alarming, under the circumstances. You probably know all about athlete's foot - it's a plague, literally, sort of. It gets worse and worse, drugs that are supposed to fix it fail, and in the end, you're a cripple living in a hell of your own devising. Perhaps not of your own devising, but, on the other hand, if you consider each cell in your body 'yours', and perhaps if you're the type of person who conceives of all the manifestations of being as possessed by motile spirits, and after all, it's probably impossible not to conceive of everything outside yourself that way, in that case you'll have to admit that athlete's foot is a hell of 'your own' 'devising', as you own each cell, you already admitted it. Of course by 'your own' we attribute to the 'your' something of a family type relationship of scattered points making up a 'single' your ... don't accuse me of getting philosophical or postmodern, I can't help it if a coterie of lunatics conspired to inform a few terms with denotations that would make Sleeping Beauty scream for an apple... back to the story. My little toe was red and inflamed, but was it, I wondered, trying to assuage my anxiety, perhaps just bruised; after all, my tender little toe, curled up there like a mole, bent over and humiliated by a lifetime of shoes, soft and unused to abuse, could be bruised easily ...? TO BE CONTINUED.
MY PAL FOOT FOOT: What, you wonder irritably, what the FUCK is Foot Foot? What an annoying name to call a toy in the first place.
15 February 2002
I went to 'Ruby in the Dust' this afternoon, a cafe/bar on the Octagon. Pat Kraus was in a mildly depressed mood, or somewhere between that and an appalling mood; I offered to buy him a drink three or four times, standing at the bar, but he wouldn't answer, so I had to ask something like, 'Are you going to answer me or not?' I was in the kind of mood where you think you're seeing the funny side, but then someone comes through a swinging door in the opposite direction to you, and you could easily give them a dirty look, and if they're a belligerent aging man and sneer at you and say 'What!?' you could puff out your chest and stick your face into theirs and look at them murderously and say 'why don't you watch out', and if they went to hit you you'd take your life in your own hands, you wouldn't mind risking death. The staff were the victims of my hatred, as there were few men coming through swinging doors; of course they barely noticed me, as they were in murderous moods themselves, after all, they were working in Ruby in the Dust, wearing black clothes, t-shirts with flour and spilt beer, and they all aspired to received attractiveness, yet none of them were quite attractive enough, they had plump chins or long oval faces with corkscrew curls or faces that were too wide with dry hair sticking out above them ...
What amazes me are these people who discipline themselves to write, encourage themselves to write, when everybody knows that writing is torture, and should be avoided whenever possible. Why write when you're not filled with contempt or compelled by monetary difficulties to do so?
Writing is only easy when you're angry, in the same way that stammerers can speak fluently when they're angry. Martin Luther wrote, 'I write better, and pray better, when I'm angry.'
But if you want to have something worthwhile to say when you do get annoyed, you better have read first.
Of course I understand why people discipline themselves to write. They are full of hope; but hope must be disguised at all costs. If anyone realises that you're hopeful, you're lost, you're on your way out for sure ... don't betray your true hopes ... and what you hope for, beloved reader, is too embarrassing for me to even mention ...
But I love everybody that I hate. If I could only degrade myself completely in front of them, kiss their feet and so on, they would be bearable to me. It's not that I would hate them less, but the hideous charge of sexual tension that exists between you and the object of your repugnance must be expressed somehow ...
July 2000
I'M NO TEENAGER. If dignity is making peace with truth, and you comprehend too much truth, well - certain complexities arise -
Anyway, I'd given up (almost) on finding the musical holy idiots who'd redeem me - and (almost) on the kind of smart-guy music everybody loves to hate, the taunters who make up for your failure to find the aforementioned holy idiots by playing round (almost mournfully) with social mores - in fact, I think I really had (almost) given up, I'd forgotten my hope, at least, I didn't think about it much at night anymore. My burning head was filled instead with rubbish (as if my hopes weren't?) How would I fill the next day, what was the exact optimum deployment of each minute - I'd never get very far, because each idea would suggest a thousand questions, and once I began pondering one of those, again the options would proliferate (these questions, by the way, were along the lines of what time of day I should wash clothes; and then, was it really best to get it over with in the morning, or should I do it at night in order to include the clothes I'd worn that day; but what if activity at night contributed to my insomnia; etc - of course, this digression will be extremely boring both to those who suffer from insomnia and have seen (and felt) it all before in the books they've consulted, and to those who don't suffer from insomnia, and are wondering why they should have to limp through the trivial thoughts that they, thank god, aren't stupid enough to entertain) - as I was saying, I'd have to somehow try to jerk my thoughts away from the endless tracks that lead into the future. For instance, last night as my head was boiling over I got muddled up and started thinking of pearls, for some reason, buying or selling them (believe me, this would have been the end result of a perfectly logical train of thought beginning from something like whether I should eat a banana for breakfast) - so I seized upon this and began entertaining the most magnificent thoughts of a garden of pearls, a world strung from pearls, fingers of pearls and sizes of pearls - if I examine the minuitae of this world, perhaps I'll escape from the future perhaps long enough to sleep for forty or 50 minutes
-well, these are the sorts of things I think about now, instead of music. I'm no teenager.
The Garden of Eden
I will describe the pleasures of my bed. I won't bother to outline the tortures of the outdoor world; I'm sure you're all familiar with them. My bed is a flat mattress near the ground, on a wooden bed frame, with woven wire underneath it. Across the room on a green leather arm chair is my black and white television. The mattress is quite firm and to me, it feels like it contains acres - I've slept on a single bed for a long time. The bed is flat, and the sheet is never wrinkled. A few days ago I bought and washed a new duvet cover for it - if this pleasure in household comfort sounds a bit bourgeois (and the light brown cover with white seashells on it is certainly middle class), it only means that I've failed to explain the importance of having your own bed when you haven't had a house for such a long time ... I'm afraid and anxious. But lying in bed watching television, I gradually feel better ... is this all I'm capable of now? I can barely even read - everything frightens me too much. But I know what it's like to be healthy and happy, and I cling to the thought that that might be accessible to me again.
Sleeping in this room is an even greater pleasure; there are no external windows and only a pale blue light filters through in the early morning, from the grate on the street that's outside my glass door. I sleep and wake up to a strange sound, and I think it's Rainy cracking nuts and eating them, but when I look at her she's asleep, so I get up and look up at the grating, and rain is falling on it, making a peculiar and non-watery sound, a crackling sound.
I go back to bed and think about Chinese Water Torture. Would it really work? I can't stop asking myself - how could people be tortured by water dripping on their face? Compare that to people having their teeth pulled out, or even being skinned alive, as I've heard happened in Afghanistan - it simply doesn't seem possible that having water dripped on your face could break you. They say that Japanese soldiers tortured people by sticking burnt matches under their fingernails. Big deal! I think to myself, comparing it to the other forms of torture. As I'm dozing I think of a band name: 86 Mirage, the name of my car. I turn it over in my mind; mirage is a beautiful word, and eventually, I conceive of a rationalisation for the name ... it's the converse of '68 Comeback. I imagine telling Petra Jane, 'I'm not anti rock, I'm anti style ... and I'm only anti rock where rock is style ... ' My car is anti-style, the style of the undecided.
Now that I think of the blue light of my bedroom, and the pleasures of lying in bed, and what I have to face today, it seems like heaven existed on earth.
-February 5 2002
I walked over to where Pat was looking at something on the computer. A boy had taken my seat and was looking at pictures of topless women. On his screen was a woman who looked like she was covered in shiny opaque stockings, with long legs and the sort of dry, dyed blonde hair that looks grey, with dark roots - like dirty straw. She was ‘striding’ across a background of chrome silver with dark corners, while wearing high heels. Probably red stiletto heels.
It’s quite strange that pornography shoe fashion is so fixed. But the reason occurs to me immediately; I saw some pornography once with girls wearing cheap sandals, the kind you would get from Dowsons, with thick white plastic soles and Velcro straps, and it was no longer pornography. In pornography you have to stick to the formula. People who mock porn actresses for having straw hair that looks grey just don’t get it; it must be that way, or you’d be immediately repulsed. Pornography requires a bed of tedium.
I didn’t hesitate; speaking about the porn-seeker loudly, in the third person, I said, ‘This boy has taken my seat and he’s looking at pictures of topless women.’ He was a pale, very straight, white boy with a beaky nose, wearing a big label t-shirt and expensive jeans. Immediately he and all his friends started sniggering; I began collecting my jacket and bag, leaning over him, perhaps almost touching him, though everything was happening very fast. As I reached for my water bottle he joked, ‘You can have your Powerade back now.’ I replied majestically, ‘Ha ha, thanks.’
Who triumphed in this battle of wits? Afterwards he talked to his friends about it for twenty minutes or so, obviously ‘reconciling’ himself to the situation. On the other hand, I walked away quickly and slunk into an armchair in a dark corner. I’m afraid that I’ve done him far too much credit by immortalising him here. Really, this is hardly the sort of thing that deserves to be mentioned. I consider it on a level with eating hazelnuts. (February 13, 2002)
