I get stuck on a song from time to time. Lately, it's an operatic tear-jerker called 'Sometime Around Midnight' by an LA indy-like band named, after the second part of the Don DeLillo novel White Noise, The Airborne Toxic Event.
I first heard the song a few months back while making toast (the morning is when I'm most vulnerable to attack) on my favourite radio station, BBC 6Music. It burrowed its way into my psyche about three weeks ago and is just now coming out after roughly 1,000,000 plays on the iPod.
The songs that get stuck always have strong emotional pulling power, and they're usually fully plotted, from setting to exposition, through customary climax and denouement. 'Sometime Around Midnight' cloys all categories, ticks all boxes.
(Even so, I'm afraid it's really not, in the end, that great a song. These attachments occur no doubt through a combination of forces: whatever's going on in my life, where I am when I hear the songs and just the right or wrong mood, for starters. But I'll leave the analysis to a qualified therapist, should I someday reach the unlikely conclusion that loving pieces of music to distraction is actually doing me harm.)
The song is set in a bar with live music, consisting of at least piano and vocals, and at a time that I think the title pretty clearly gives away.
First off, there's the melancholy instrumental introduction, set to electronically enhanced strings and probably keyboards. It's an opening that draws blood and, just after clearing the floor of the spilled stuff of life, is followed by a vibrato-treated, but otherwise untainted and minimal guitar riff played on a standard issue Fender Stratocaster. I know this because I used to own one, and no other instrument quite clips and chimes simultaneously with such dramatic effect. A stoned monkey can make a raw Stratocaster vamp sound magical, and The Airborne Toxic Event's guitarist and producer realised straight away that all they needed to do was plug the thing directly into a second-hand Peavey turned up to, maybe, five to achieve the very simple, plaintive voice that sets the ghostly rocking stage upon which the song crashes into the heart.
Queue the singer, Mikel Jollett, a name I have no clue how to pronounce, although I'm drawn to "Michael" after living nine years in a land where every word, no matter how foreign or foreign-seeming, is more shamelessly Anglicised than anywhere else in the English-speaking world.
According to Wikipedia, Jollett suffers from, "a genetic autoimmune disease which led [him] to develop two cosmetic conditions: Alopecia areata and Vitiligo," which apparently render him simultaneously hairless and of uneven skin pigmentation. So he's a bit challenged, and that he sings so sweetly, almost boyishly, the opening lines of the song only heightens the vulnerability of the protagonist. It's probably wrong, but I feel a bit sorry for both singer and subject straight away.
And it starts sometime around midnight -
Or at least that's when you forget yourself for a minute or two.
Our protagonist is having a nice night out, it seems. He's relaxing and letting himself go, forgetting himself and who he is. The danger, of course, is that he could share fates with the protagonist of Douglas Coupland's Life After God, who forgets from time to time, early in the morning, who the adult 'he' is and what he is contractually obligated to get up and go do in the world. He ends up retreating into the British Columbian wilderness and submersing himself in an ice cold stream, an experience that forces his balls to retreat into his body, where he realises he is sick and needs God after all. Caveat, forgettor.
As you stand under the bar lights
And the band plays some song about forgetting yourself for awhile.
And the piano's this melancholy soundcheck to her smile.
And in that white dress she's wearing; you haven't seen her for awhile.
Enter our white-clad mystery woman, who has been out of sight recently. Who is this woman who's so suddenly insinuated herself into this man's revelry? And why has she turned up when he's feeling so emancipated, relaxed and vulnerable?
But you know that she's watching.
She's laughing, she's turning, she's holding her tonic like a cross.
Why is she watching? Perhaps she's keen to see our hero see her having a wonderful time - a comportment that indicates she may wish for him to suffer the best form of revenge: looking good. But she can't leave it at that. She flies in for the full sensory overload, including especially smell, the memory trigger of all memory triggers.
The room's suddenly spinning.
She walks up and asks how you are.
So you can smell her perfume,
You can see her lying naked in your arms.
There's clearly history here, and it seems whatever it was that went on between these two ended in a way that could not be described as 'rosy.'
And so there's a change in your emotions.
Well, duh, and why doesn't he just wear a sign saying "I am, like, SO heartbroken right now! Again, for fuck sake! Arrrrrrgh!" Sometimes, my fellow countrymen, I swear...
And to drive the point into the ground, the guitar enhances the mood by slipping into a noisier mode, akin to the up-the-neck chiming pioneered by The Edge. Still, somehow, despite its sentimentalism, the gesture works.
And all these memories come rushing
Like feral waves to your mind.
Of the curl of your bodies like two perfect circles entwined.
And you feel hopeless and homeless and lost in the haze of the wine.
Ah, poetry. That last line does for the form what any good run of David Mamet dialogue did for iambic pentameter. And now he's filled up again, this time with memories. Did he do her wrong and still regrets it? Is she dangling the big, juicy worm of her irresistible feminine wiles in front of him because she knows what effect it will have on him, and wants to injure him?
Hold tight. It gets much worse.
Then she leaves with someone you don't know.
But she makes sure you saw her
She looks right at you and bolts
As she walks out the door,
Your blood boiling and your stomach in ropes
It's here that Jollett's voice jumps the octave from the land of "I'm so far immune" to "I can't resist the urge to drag you down with me." But she's hit our hero with a cheap shot, perhaps, and again it seems we're still dealing with either warranted retribution or just plain cruelty.
And when your friends say "What is it?
You look like you've seen a ghost."
All hell breaks loose in the orchestra. Guitar, strings, and keyboards conspire to whip us into a sympathetic frenzy of angst and pity heretofore not seen since Elsa walked on to the cathedral, despite the pagan witch Ortrud's vow to imminently destroy her happy world, if not happiness itself, In the Wagner opera Lohengrin. It's all about to go tits up, in short, and famously.
Onward our hero, broken, frustrated and screaming into the night. The rock orchestra goes with him, buoying up his horror and shock into what is either an irredeemable fray of sophomoric emotion or a genuine trauma.
Then you walk under the streetlights
And you're too drunk to notice
That everyone's staring at you
In my experience, this doesn't require a tremendous amount of booze. But adding a reasonable enough quantity of the elixir of amnesia to the forces that have gathered in the face of having a former, and, it seems, wronged - or wrong - love ramming their new-found happiness so viciously up one's nose makes it seem almost feasible.
Still, there's something wrong with all this emotion. Who did what to whom? Is she just a vindictive person? Is he just a sap? Both or neither? I can hardly wait to find out. (And, rest assured, Jollett won't tell us.)
You so care what you look like
The world is falling around you.
It's here I have to pause to hail the understated brilliance of the little-known phenomenon of California irony. To say "You so care what you look like" is the same as saying "You don't care at all how you look." The technique, if it is one, was probably first made popular by Frank Zappa's daughter Moon Unit in the almost-hit Valley Girl off the 1982 album "Ship Arriving Too Late to Save a Drowning Witch." Say what you will about the vacuousness of Los Angeles: there's a nugget of genius in this usage that has been shamefully underrated.
You just have to see her
You just have to see her
You just have to see her
You just have to see her
You just have to see her
You know that she'll break you in two.
Oh, come on now. Really? She doesn't want to see you, so why do you want to see her? What sort of self-disrespecting masochist is this lost boy of ours? How can he become so forlorn, so heartbroken at the one-off sighting of some bird who doesn't care if he lives, but only cares if he dies?
It was after two weeks of suffocating under the weight of the song's raw emotion that I started to consider what was probably happening. I don't like the idea of leaving a hero bleeding needlessly in the artificial light of a drunken stumble home, or worse place, after seeing a woman who seems to want to destroy him, so I did my best to rescue his reputation.
The only way I can seem to redeem this poor sucker is to assume that the woman is dead. He only sees her when he forgets who he is, where he is and, I assume, everything about himself, including everything he's trying desperately to forget. His guard is down sometime around midnight, the witching hour. She's wearing a white dress and carrying a cross. He can smell her perfume, and his intentionally repressed memories of lost love come streaking into him like wild animals out of a black and terrifying forest. And it all happens because he makes a failed attempt to allow himself to start getting his life back to normal. He takes a chance, but it's a gamble as risky as betting a year's wages on the first five cards of a draw poker hand. It's just way too soon, but he couldn't have known. He makes a schoolboy error, but it's a big one.
The opening string motif returns, echoed in the guitar and driven into the light by the persistent beat of the drums. The music gently trails off, and the lonely guitar reduces everything to an ambivalent calm through an unsteady plucking of two notes that futilely trip over themselves at the end, as if they were traumatised and stumbling homeward late in the evening.
Bring on the hangover of a lifetime.
Saturday, 18 July 2009
Sunday, 24 May 2009
The Real Pirates of Penzance
My journey to Cornwall Saturday morning began at 6:35 at the bus stop just outside my front door.
It's the nearest stop and serviced only by a 'cracker box cum ghetto' bus: one of those London buses that is indeed red, but missing the upper storey in order to clear dodgy railway overpasses in dodgy neighbourhoods. Not that my neighbourhood is dodgy - unless I cross over the road. My side of the street: lovely Edwardian blocks designed by architects back when architects still cared. The other side: brown brick, broken security doors, pit bull terriers, children who literally kill other children.
In short, typical London demi-socialist idyll. But back to the bus.
I hadn't planned to take the 360 bus until about five minutes before I left home to begin my journey. I reckoned I'd drag my slitty-eyed carcass down to Vauxhall station on foot, grab the fleet-wheeled Victoria line to Oxford Circus and change to the Bakerloo to Paddington. Simples. But the weekend bag (full of, among too many other things, the computer I'm typing on) was wearing me down, so I locked the door, set the alarm and grunted the 20 metres or so to the bus stop.
Now, I'm no optimist when it comes to London buses. They're frequently shit, but, like shit, also a necessity. I read the schedule, which is about as reliable as pulp fiction if it's reality you're after, and noted that the buses came to this stop every 10 to 12 minutes.
What I failed to notice until 15 frustrating minutes later was that I was reading the weekday schedule and applying it to a Saturday. And because I love to salt a self-inflicted wound, I realised I'd been referring to the schedule not only for the wrong day, but also for the wrong part of the morning. The buses only come every 10 to 12 minutes, I now know extremely well, after about 8am, Monday to Friday.
On Saturday, they come at 12, 32 and 50 past the hour until late morning. Doh. (And what's most shocking is that this bus stop is literally within spitting distance of my bedroom window, and I've lived next to it for three years. So much for pathos.)
I'll be fine, I thought. If I'm picked up at 6:50, that still leaves 40 minutes from the moment I step on the imminent 360 until my train leaves Paddington. Surely, I thought in an optimistic burst of holiday euphoria, the gods will smile on me, and this will come to pass.
It didn't, of course. The bus was seven minutes late. The Nationwide cash point at Vauxhall station - and I swear to you this is true AND certainly some sort of conspiracy of the deities - took nearly five minutes to complete my transaction from the time I slipped my card in. It took in the card and held it - nay, cradled and perhaps suckled it for all I know - for a good 40 panicky seconds before asking me if I wouldn't mind please entering my PIN, as though nothing out of the ordinary was happening. I said 'hello' to 7:10am before I set foot on the Victoria line.
Leaving out other minor annoyances - except for not understanding at Oxford Circus that the northbound Bakerloo platform is literally adjacent the northbound Victoria, and letting a standing train pull away in a colossal schoolboy error that cost me another four minutes - I eventually bounded up the escalator onto the main floor at Paddington just in time to see my train sleepily drifting away from platform one.
My next mistake was telling anyone about it.
"You'll need to buy another ticket, I'm afraid," said the man with the heavy west-Midlands accent behind the bullet-proof glass (and now you know why it's bullet-proof). I said I wasn't going to go to stupid Penzance after all. "Fair enough," he said.
It is about here that the mind really fucking boggles. Those of us who, by dint of whatever insanity we entertain, continue to live in Britain know how Kafka-esque making a train journey can be. I'm always surprised when I leave a station at the other end of the line that I'm not played off by a quartet of singing dwarfs, thanking me for traveling with Southwest or Whatever Trains and handing me a chocolate. Even so, you miss your train, you could usually just grab the next one, no harm done.
Not if you've booked with, in this case, First Great Western several weeks in advance and are, it turns out, tied to a specific, scheduled return journey under penalty of financial ruin. This means you have to be perfect twice in one week, and I just don't know how to do that.
I staggered about for a bit, allowing the reality to slowly, painfully settle in. I had paid £44 for my entire journey. I missed the outbound leg of that journey by about a minute. And if I really wanted to go to Cornwall and stay in the lovely hotel with the sea-view room I'd also booked several weeks ago, I'd have to cough up another - sit down and hold tight - £83. I threw my bag, computer and all, to the floor of Paddington railway station and shouted "fuck."
I'm smarter than this, I thought. Surely the internet is the answer. I bought a coffee and sat in a wi-fi zone. I next bought a voucher for 90 minutes worth of BT wi-fi and went back to the drawing board.
£83 again, now with an additional £5.88 tacked on for internet use. (See what I mean about salt and wounds?)
I'd had enough, and there was only one thing to do. Eat the £83, pay for it with what little 'emergency savings' I had left and never think of it again.
This would have been an extremely successful strategy - one deeply rooted, for a change, in adult-mindedness and born of essential wisdom - had someone checked that I had the correct ticket at any point during the shitting five and a half hour journey to Penzance.
And so it came down to this: Do I sit there for five and a half hours with the wrong ticket on the wrong train, essentially a fugitive, and stress myself with the various arrest and police record scenarios that would inevitably roll one into the other in my over-active Protestant-guilty imagination? Or do I console myself with the knowledge that I've done the right thing, regardless of whether or not anyone clacked a hole in my ticket?
Of course, I felt a total mug when I got off the train. The only thing that made me feel any better was being here in the sunshine, amongst the rolling hills in verdant, wild Cornwall. My next stop was the Penzance bus station (boy, do I know how to travel or WHAT?) to catch a hedgerow-dodging, tree-branch-snapping double decker bus to the picturesque village of Sennen near Land's End.
When I finally got there, I felt safe, for it is the part of Cornwall that no railway can touch. Those last 12 miles of Britain are like a green lunar surface: remote, unspoiled, oddly beautiful - and seemingly far, far away from the surreality of the British railway system. I wandered down to a restaurant on the beach at Sennen Cove, ate grilled scallops and monkfish on skewers and left the railway pirates at the end of their line of influence in happy - albeit slightly cursed - Penzance.
It's the nearest stop and serviced only by a 'cracker box cum ghetto' bus: one of those London buses that is indeed red, but missing the upper storey in order to clear dodgy railway overpasses in dodgy neighbourhoods. Not that my neighbourhood is dodgy - unless I cross over the road. My side of the street: lovely Edwardian blocks designed by architects back when architects still cared. The other side: brown brick, broken security doors, pit bull terriers, children who literally kill other children.
In short, typical London demi-socialist idyll. But back to the bus.
I hadn't planned to take the 360 bus until about five minutes before I left home to begin my journey. I reckoned I'd drag my slitty-eyed carcass down to Vauxhall station on foot, grab the fleet-wheeled Victoria line to Oxford Circus and change to the Bakerloo to Paddington. Simples. But the weekend bag (full of, among too many other things, the computer I'm typing on) was wearing me down, so I locked the door, set the alarm and grunted the 20 metres or so to the bus stop.
Now, I'm no optimist when it comes to London buses. They're frequently shit, but, like shit, also a necessity. I read the schedule, which is about as reliable as pulp fiction if it's reality you're after, and noted that the buses came to this stop every 10 to 12 minutes.
What I failed to notice until 15 frustrating minutes later was that I was reading the weekday schedule and applying it to a Saturday. And because I love to salt a self-inflicted wound, I realised I'd been referring to the schedule not only for the wrong day, but also for the wrong part of the morning. The buses only come every 10 to 12 minutes, I now know extremely well, after about 8am, Monday to Friday.
On Saturday, they come at 12, 32 and 50 past the hour until late morning. Doh. (And what's most shocking is that this bus stop is literally within spitting distance of my bedroom window, and I've lived next to it for three years. So much for pathos.)
I'll be fine, I thought. If I'm picked up at 6:50, that still leaves 40 minutes from the moment I step on the imminent 360 until my train leaves Paddington. Surely, I thought in an optimistic burst of holiday euphoria, the gods will smile on me, and this will come to pass.
It didn't, of course. The bus was seven minutes late. The Nationwide cash point at Vauxhall station - and I swear to you this is true AND certainly some sort of conspiracy of the deities - took nearly five minutes to complete my transaction from the time I slipped my card in. It took in the card and held it - nay, cradled and perhaps suckled it for all I know - for a good 40 panicky seconds before asking me if I wouldn't mind please entering my PIN, as though nothing out of the ordinary was happening. I said 'hello' to 7:10am before I set foot on the Victoria line.
Leaving out other minor annoyances - except for not understanding at Oxford Circus that the northbound Bakerloo platform is literally adjacent the northbound Victoria, and letting a standing train pull away in a colossal schoolboy error that cost me another four minutes - I eventually bounded up the escalator onto the main floor at Paddington just in time to see my train sleepily drifting away from platform one.
My next mistake was telling anyone about it.
"You'll need to buy another ticket, I'm afraid," said the man with the heavy west-Midlands accent behind the bullet-proof glass (and now you know why it's bullet-proof). I said I wasn't going to go to stupid Penzance after all. "Fair enough," he said.
It is about here that the mind really fucking boggles. Those of us who, by dint of whatever insanity we entertain, continue to live in Britain know how Kafka-esque making a train journey can be. I'm always surprised when I leave a station at the other end of the line that I'm not played off by a quartet of singing dwarfs, thanking me for traveling with Southwest or Whatever Trains and handing me a chocolate. Even so, you miss your train, you could usually just grab the next one, no harm done.
Not if you've booked with, in this case, First Great Western several weeks in advance and are, it turns out, tied to a specific, scheduled return journey under penalty of financial ruin. This means you have to be perfect twice in one week, and I just don't know how to do that.
I staggered about for a bit, allowing the reality to slowly, painfully settle in. I had paid £44 for my entire journey. I missed the outbound leg of that journey by about a minute. And if I really wanted to go to Cornwall and stay in the lovely hotel with the sea-view room I'd also booked several weeks ago, I'd have to cough up another - sit down and hold tight - £83. I threw my bag, computer and all, to the floor of Paddington railway station and shouted "fuck."
I'm smarter than this, I thought. Surely the internet is the answer. I bought a coffee and sat in a wi-fi zone. I next bought a voucher for 90 minutes worth of BT wi-fi and went back to the drawing board.
£83 again, now with an additional £5.88 tacked on for internet use. (See what I mean about salt and wounds?)
I'd had enough, and there was only one thing to do. Eat the £83, pay for it with what little 'emergency savings' I had left and never think of it again.
This would have been an extremely successful strategy - one deeply rooted, for a change, in adult-mindedness and born of essential wisdom - had someone checked that I had the correct ticket at any point during the shitting five and a half hour journey to Penzance.
And so it came down to this: Do I sit there for five and a half hours with the wrong ticket on the wrong train, essentially a fugitive, and stress myself with the various arrest and police record scenarios that would inevitably roll one into the other in my over-active Protestant-guilty imagination? Or do I console myself with the knowledge that I've done the right thing, regardless of whether or not anyone clacked a hole in my ticket?
Of course, I felt a total mug when I got off the train. The only thing that made me feel any better was being here in the sunshine, amongst the rolling hills in verdant, wild Cornwall. My next stop was the Penzance bus station (boy, do I know how to travel or WHAT?) to catch a hedgerow-dodging, tree-branch-snapping double decker bus to the picturesque village of Sennen near Land's End.
When I finally got there, I felt safe, for it is the part of Cornwall that no railway can touch. Those last 12 miles of Britain are like a green lunar surface: remote, unspoiled, oddly beautiful - and seemingly far, far away from the surreality of the British railway system. I wandered down to a restaurant on the beach at Sennen Cove, ate grilled scallops and monkfish on skewers and left the railway pirates at the end of their line of influence in happy - albeit slightly cursed - Penzance.
Saturday, 9 May 2009
Jesus is watching: give him a blanket
For the established religions to 'work,' it's best to reject science. In few places is this practiced more completely and comically than in those postulates that aim to prove the existence of a personal Jesus Christ.
Was there really a Jesus Christ? Christians to this day seek physical proof of His existence in order to historically substantiate their beliefs and thereby establish their God, religion and themselves as “the Ones.” They point to scrolls and rotting cloth sheets as evidence that in the Bible is written the Truth about Jesus Christ, whoever He may or may not have been. (They're not the only religious camp to try this on, so don't think I'm just picking on the well meaning, poor, vilified, victimised, hollow-eyed whole of Christianity. That would be mean!)
Was there really a physical Jesus Christ? The better question is, “Why does it matter to you so much?”
But the best and most entertaining question would be, 'Where is Jesus now?' Biblical texts tell us, or many tell us that they tell us, that the Christ, upon His resurrection and disinterment, ascended into Heaven. The Christ became airborne of God’s volition and headed straight up into the sky, no doubt startling and inspiring a small crowd of onlookers, who'd never seen anything other than a bird or butterfly do such an impossible thing.
So, where is Jesus now? It depends on many things. Is the Christ actually still “of the flesh” up there? If so, He must be very cold in the vacuum of space. How fast does Jesus’ shivering person travel? Can He exceed the speed of light, believed to be the maximum velocity of all tangible things? Some Christians might say He is capable of traveling faster than light, but that seems an inadmissible physical favouritism. I mean, if Jesus Christ could outstrip light on the celestial racetrack, then nuts could someday fall up from the tree. (Couldn't they?)
How far away is Heaven, anyway? Is it an actual place? Giving Jesus the benefit of the doubt, which would constitute an appropriate act of Christian kindness, if He died at age 30, as the bible says, and was splitting along at nearly 190,000 miles per second, He could be at most 1,980 light years away, presuming He hasn’t yet reached Heaven, which He may or may not have done, because no one really knows where it is. (Do they?)
In January, 1998, the Hubble Space Telescope detected a collection of isolated, intergalactic 'red giant' stars near the Virgo galaxy cluster, about 60 million light years from Earth, or 30,500 times further away than Jesus’ current, or roughly current, position.
Why, then, have no astronomers seen Jesus? Is He not full of radiance, as the good book says? If He emits His own light and is so relatively close to us, surely Hubble should have sent back a Polaroid by now.
And I like to think he'd be smiling and waving at us. I really, really do. (Don't you?)
So, kiddies, before you lay down your heads tonight, spare a thought for the freezing Saviour of Mankind. And, if you're lucky enough to be falling asleep in a middle-class home, do the right thing and offer Him a jumper.
Was there really a Jesus Christ? Christians to this day seek physical proof of His existence in order to historically substantiate their beliefs and thereby establish their God, religion and themselves as “the Ones.” They point to scrolls and rotting cloth sheets as evidence that in the Bible is written the Truth about Jesus Christ, whoever He may or may not have been. (They're not the only religious camp to try this on, so don't think I'm just picking on the well meaning, poor, vilified, victimised, hollow-eyed whole of Christianity. That would be mean!)
Was there really a physical Jesus Christ? The better question is, “Why does it matter to you so much?”
But the best and most entertaining question would be, 'Where is Jesus now?' Biblical texts tell us, or many tell us that they tell us, that the Christ, upon His resurrection and disinterment, ascended into Heaven. The Christ became airborne of God’s volition and headed straight up into the sky, no doubt startling and inspiring a small crowd of onlookers, who'd never seen anything other than a bird or butterfly do such an impossible thing.
So, where is Jesus now? It depends on many things. Is the Christ actually still “of the flesh” up there? If so, He must be very cold in the vacuum of space. How fast does Jesus’ shivering person travel? Can He exceed the speed of light, believed to be the maximum velocity of all tangible things? Some Christians might say He is capable of traveling faster than light, but that seems an inadmissible physical favouritism. I mean, if Jesus Christ could outstrip light on the celestial racetrack, then nuts could someday fall up from the tree. (Couldn't they?)
How far away is Heaven, anyway? Is it an actual place? Giving Jesus the benefit of the doubt, which would constitute an appropriate act of Christian kindness, if He died at age 30, as the bible says, and was splitting along at nearly 190,000 miles per second, He could be at most 1,980 light years away, presuming He hasn’t yet reached Heaven, which He may or may not have done, because no one really knows where it is. (Do they?)
In January, 1998, the Hubble Space Telescope detected a collection of isolated, intergalactic 'red giant' stars near the Virgo galaxy cluster, about 60 million light years from Earth, or 30,500 times further away than Jesus’ current, or roughly current, position.
Why, then, have no astronomers seen Jesus? Is He not full of radiance, as the good book says? If He emits His own light and is so relatively close to us, surely Hubble should have sent back a Polaroid by now.
And I like to think he'd be smiling and waving at us. I really, really do. (Don't you?)
So, kiddies, before you lay down your heads tonight, spare a thought for the freezing Saviour of Mankind. And, if you're lucky enough to be falling asleep in a middle-class home, do the right thing and offer Him a jumper.
Friday, 8 May 2009
Une saison en paresse
Unlike Arthur Rimbaud, the influential and at times downright wacked-out 19th century French poet, I have never smoked opium nor enjoyed, if that's the right word, opiates of any stripe for which the name was not first gently scrawled across a prescription pad. I know nothing of heroin, except that it would seem to be a really, really bad idea to seek out someone who sells it, let alone try and most certainly buy and buy and buy it. My sole insertion of a suppository made of morphine yielded only one of the most psychologically and physically vacuous evenings of my life - and given the gaping three-months-deep void in which I spent the winter just gone, that's really saying something.
No, narcotics and I don't mix. But sloth and I most definitely became more than acquainted this past winter. I lay around the house so convincingly that if a casual observer from space managed to stay awake to monitor the duration of the sorry situation that did not unfold on the surface of the backwater planet to which she'd been regrettably assigned, she'd have shot herself with a ray gun, exasperated by the sheer futility of it all. I spent many, many days between January and March indulging in the false bliss of the nearly total absence of the urge to create, a status affixed by David Mamet to the definition of the word 'decadence.'
I have been brilliantly decadent. Some days, I awoke in the late morning angry at the fact of sunlight. Another day leering and mocking, arms folded, staring at me cockily, secure in its knowledge that, if this was another day to be wasted, it was all my fault. And I'm sure I wasted many probably beautiful, sunny late-winter days lying about and staring, from across the room, at the covers of the increasingly thick stack of New Yorker and Time Out magazines gathering moss on the dining table - at which, appropriately enough, I hadn't sat down to eat in the two months prior to having guests round for Sunday lunch in February.
I reposed my way through this darker and colder than normal winter, tacitly squashing an ass dent in the cushion of my sofa so convincing that it still exists despite rearranging the couch bits more than a month ago. I did nothing all winter apart from write copy for clients for money, which I also managed to do from a prone position in the sofa dent.
I gained weight for the first winter since 2004, when I was still with my last long-term partner, who, in his attempt to be adoring, proclaimed the March me 'winter Frank.' Winter Frank returned this year with a record-tying body fat accumulation of something like five spanking new kilograms.
My 32-inch LCD television became one of my best friends, and the back stories of the characters of Frasier became more interesting than my own. My other friend was a dead git from Tennessee called Jack Daniels.
It's puzzling when a localised death creeps into your house and breathes its grey carbon dioxide into you. I still don't fully understand what motivation - or lack thereof - lead me to flop idly for three months as I watched my friends' careers accelerate. Even my friends in the performing arts moved a notch or two up the rickety ladders they've chosen to climb. But I got nowhere other than exactly where I'd been since October of last year, stuck in a silent neutral gear, not of despair or hopelessness, but clearly not of their opposites, either.
Absolutely. Nothing. Happened.
In New York in the middle of the 1990s, I fell in with a group of quasi-activist pseudo-philosophers who proclaimed themselves proponents of a 'New Humanism.' I parted ways with them after a year or so of being accused of 'weakness' for not vigorously proceeding through life with thought, feeling and action in alignment. I didn't feel the need to grandstand about my achievements, and I still don't. I may work in marketing, but I've never been terribly fond of selling myself. They took what they perceived to be my reticence for weakness, and I never forgave them for being such blockheads that they couldn't see that my way of cutting a subtle but progressive course through life was not weakness but individuality.
What I did take away from the experience was a simple truth that still makes absolute sense to me: there is no such thing as stasis in human life. There is only movement forward or backward, progression or retrogression. Only by ploughing on determinedly can life be considered to be moving forward, even if that determination leads one down paths that slam suddenly into unexpected dead ends. We generally refer to this as 'learning by trial and error.' Obviously, self harm and its negative-Nelly neighbours lead one backward. But what of the self-delusion of 'remaining the same?'
This, the New Humanists half preached to me, was akin to executing a self-harm regime against the soul, for each day that one remains in an apparent holding pattern, one learns only that tomorrow will be more or less the same as today. And when tomorrow's inner life can only be expected to yield the same result as today's, hope is expunged from the heart. Sustaining a stasis, therefore, leads only to spiritual death. Things cannot stay the way they are; or, in short, when we hold still too long, we die while living - or perhaps 'metabolising' is the better word.
(Clearly the winter weight gain signaled that I wasn't metabolising efficiently enough.)
And now, in the springtime of both season and soul, I turn to ask myself, 'What the fuck was that all about?' Why the sudden, sustained interest in next to nothing? Was it seasonal affective disorder? An exhaustion with life? A stretched out bad mood? An unnumbered chapter in the book of Mid-life Crises?
I think perhaps it was as simple as this: Left largely unchecked, and working alone at home, I forgot to get on with it. The days in London in winter are short. They end before 4pm. The tendency can be to hibernate, and it appears that I had done so. Perhaps the current phase of my career had reached its pinnacle, and it was time to try other ways of making money. But the winter came, and my cosy little flat turned into not just a sanctuary, but a bear cave with a leather sleeping area.
Or perhaps I'm underselling myself, as I've frequently done, to myself. I arranged a work area in the corner of my room, eventually, in order to clearly differentiate between 'home' and 'office.' I installed insulation around my doors and windows. I put up huge roller blinds to provide more privacy. But even these things pointed to a tendency towards self-isolation, to adopting a 'please leave me be' posture. Was it time, as the old REM song goes, that I had some time alone?
Living alone is wonderful, but it has its drawbacks, not the least of which is the lack of another human being in your house off which you can bounce ideas, thoughts and opinions. Or just someone who expects you to get up in the morning because they have to get up in the morning. Or a life form other than a plant to remind you that you simply must keep going, keep trying, keep creating.
I'm thawing nicely now, and ideas are beginning to flow again. In the final analysis, what probably happened was an unintended conspiracy of forces. I needed rejuvenating, and it wasn't springtime. I needed energy, and the sun wasn't shining. I needed strength to move off the sofa, but the gym was a mile down the road through the rain and cold. Did it all just stack up against me in a wall of bad timing and bad luck?
Whatever it was, it stands as a warning for next winter and a lesson I shall not soon forget. I mean, my god! I'm so fat!
No, narcotics and I don't mix. But sloth and I most definitely became more than acquainted this past winter. I lay around the house so convincingly that if a casual observer from space managed to stay awake to monitor the duration of the sorry situation that did not unfold on the surface of the backwater planet to which she'd been regrettably assigned, she'd have shot herself with a ray gun, exasperated by the sheer futility of it all. I spent many, many days between January and March indulging in the false bliss of the nearly total absence of the urge to create, a status affixed by David Mamet to the definition of the word 'decadence.'
I have been brilliantly decadent. Some days, I awoke in the late morning angry at the fact of sunlight. Another day leering and mocking, arms folded, staring at me cockily, secure in its knowledge that, if this was another day to be wasted, it was all my fault. And I'm sure I wasted many probably beautiful, sunny late-winter days lying about and staring, from across the room, at the covers of the increasingly thick stack of New Yorker and Time Out magazines gathering moss on the dining table - at which, appropriately enough, I hadn't sat down to eat in the two months prior to having guests round for Sunday lunch in February.
I reposed my way through this darker and colder than normal winter, tacitly squashing an ass dent in the cushion of my sofa so convincing that it still exists despite rearranging the couch bits more than a month ago. I did nothing all winter apart from write copy for clients for money, which I also managed to do from a prone position in the sofa dent.
I gained weight for the first winter since 2004, when I was still with my last long-term partner, who, in his attempt to be adoring, proclaimed the March me 'winter Frank.' Winter Frank returned this year with a record-tying body fat accumulation of something like five spanking new kilograms.
My 32-inch LCD television became one of my best friends, and the back stories of the characters of Frasier became more interesting than my own. My other friend was a dead git from Tennessee called Jack Daniels.
It's puzzling when a localised death creeps into your house and breathes its grey carbon dioxide into you. I still don't fully understand what motivation - or lack thereof - lead me to flop idly for three months as I watched my friends' careers accelerate. Even my friends in the performing arts moved a notch or two up the rickety ladders they've chosen to climb. But I got nowhere other than exactly where I'd been since October of last year, stuck in a silent neutral gear, not of despair or hopelessness, but clearly not of their opposites, either.
Absolutely. Nothing. Happened.
In New York in the middle of the 1990s, I fell in with a group of quasi-activist pseudo-philosophers who proclaimed themselves proponents of a 'New Humanism.' I parted ways with them after a year or so of being accused of 'weakness' for not vigorously proceeding through life with thought, feeling and action in alignment. I didn't feel the need to grandstand about my achievements, and I still don't. I may work in marketing, but I've never been terribly fond of selling myself. They took what they perceived to be my reticence for weakness, and I never forgave them for being such blockheads that they couldn't see that my way of cutting a subtle but progressive course through life was not weakness but individuality.
What I did take away from the experience was a simple truth that still makes absolute sense to me: there is no such thing as stasis in human life. There is only movement forward or backward, progression or retrogression. Only by ploughing on determinedly can life be considered to be moving forward, even if that determination leads one down paths that slam suddenly into unexpected dead ends. We generally refer to this as 'learning by trial and error.' Obviously, self harm and its negative-Nelly neighbours lead one backward. But what of the self-delusion of 'remaining the same?'
This, the New Humanists half preached to me, was akin to executing a self-harm regime against the soul, for each day that one remains in an apparent holding pattern, one learns only that tomorrow will be more or less the same as today. And when tomorrow's inner life can only be expected to yield the same result as today's, hope is expunged from the heart. Sustaining a stasis, therefore, leads only to spiritual death. Things cannot stay the way they are; or, in short, when we hold still too long, we die while living - or perhaps 'metabolising' is the better word.
(Clearly the winter weight gain signaled that I wasn't metabolising efficiently enough.)
And now, in the springtime of both season and soul, I turn to ask myself, 'What the fuck was that all about?' Why the sudden, sustained interest in next to nothing? Was it seasonal affective disorder? An exhaustion with life? A stretched out bad mood? An unnumbered chapter in the book of Mid-life Crises?
I think perhaps it was as simple as this: Left largely unchecked, and working alone at home, I forgot to get on with it. The days in London in winter are short. They end before 4pm. The tendency can be to hibernate, and it appears that I had done so. Perhaps the current phase of my career had reached its pinnacle, and it was time to try other ways of making money. But the winter came, and my cosy little flat turned into not just a sanctuary, but a bear cave with a leather sleeping area.
Or perhaps I'm underselling myself, as I've frequently done, to myself. I arranged a work area in the corner of my room, eventually, in order to clearly differentiate between 'home' and 'office.' I installed insulation around my doors and windows. I put up huge roller blinds to provide more privacy. But even these things pointed to a tendency towards self-isolation, to adopting a 'please leave me be' posture. Was it time, as the old REM song goes, that I had some time alone?
Living alone is wonderful, but it has its drawbacks, not the least of which is the lack of another human being in your house off which you can bounce ideas, thoughts and opinions. Or just someone who expects you to get up in the morning because they have to get up in the morning. Or a life form other than a plant to remind you that you simply must keep going, keep trying, keep creating.
I'm thawing nicely now, and ideas are beginning to flow again. In the final analysis, what probably happened was an unintended conspiracy of forces. I needed rejuvenating, and it wasn't springtime. I needed energy, and the sun wasn't shining. I needed strength to move off the sofa, but the gym was a mile down the road through the rain and cold. Did it all just stack up against me in a wall of bad timing and bad luck?
Whatever it was, it stands as a warning for next winter and a lesson I shall not soon forget. I mean, my god! I'm so fat!
Thursday, 9 April 2009
You should be so lucky. Lucky, lucky, lucky.
If you've got ideas so compelling and rich that you choose to live according to them, I can only ask you to reconsider. They could actually end up costing you your life.
Not my sister's ideas. Those won't get her killed. No sirree. She lives in the United States in 2009, and no matter how locally unpopular her ideas are, the balance is weighted so heavily in her dissident favour that murdering her, on behalf of an individual or, worse, the state, would be seen as much more blasphemous than any blasphemy she could commit by sticking like mad, mad superglue to her crazy, crazy ideas.
Of course, my sister has no crazy ideas. She's a nurse, a mother of two rather sophisticated young adults and the wife of a hard-working, dedicated husband. She simply dared to speak her mind in the face of so much vitriolic disagreement in the low-key melees that sprung up all around her during the last US general election campaign.
The lunatic mother-woman stood there in the middle of Ohio and favoured Obama. Worse yet, she didn't care who knew it. Even so, she and I spent hours on the phone in the weeks leading up to the polling - so many hours that we were equally worried about making our mortgage payments when the bills arrived.
We spent that much time on the phone together because she was concerned - especially at the beginning of it all - that she had gone legitimately mad. Her family members (apart from me, but I'm clearly insane, so what of it?), some friends, people with whom she shared rides to work, people at work, her former in-laws and every nature of shopkeeper, beekeeper, newspaper delivery boy and local shepherd called her everything but white (which is technically incorrect and vastly irrelevant) upon discovery of the fact that she was in favour of the man who eventually became the 44th President of the United States becoming the 44th President of the United States.
Imagine the balls on the silly cow! But I oxymoronically digress.
My sister endured endless, pointless arguments, jibes, name-calling (really!) and accusations that consisted mainly of assertions that she was a terrorist. How on earth could she justify voting for one otherwise? She must be anti-America, anti-freedom, anti-Christian, etc., because she supported an anti-American etc. candidate. Of course, at the root of every one of these horrible diatribes was racism - and racism that wasn't very cheerfully tarted up at that.
Even so, if you go to the supermarket one day, and all the other shoppers tell you that red grapes are poisonous, there's a little part of you that doubts what you thought unassailable. Then you look at those grapes differently for the second or two before you slap yourself back to reality and put a bunch in your basket.
And so we talked and talked, reminding each other that it was better to be hopeful rather than nihilistic, hopeful rather than fearful, hopeful rather than racist. We talked and we talked and we talked, and no one killed us.
We're lucky, and I knew that. Until I watched the German film 'Sophie Scholl' a few days ago, I had only a rough idea of how incredibly lucky we are.
The film is a dramatic retelling of the arrest, trial and execution of Sophie Scholl, her brother Hans and Christoph Probst, three Bavarian students who, as three-fifths of the White Rose, peacefully resisted the Nazis near the end of World War II using the written word and nothing else. They observed what was happening around them, bought a typewriter, paper and stamps, started telling the truth and paid with their lives. Sounds to me as though they were asking for it.
Many ordinary Germans were in the same two-holed boat but didn't have the spirit to proceed. They had lost the right to talk against the grain, and they were about to lose their country. The most rudimentary of moral codes had been replaced in an official capacity with an umbrella of despotic delusion in the face of the start of the decline of fascism in Europe, which is to say the fall of the Axis. That five students were able to cause so much trouble for the Nazis using a typewriter and the postal service is remarkable.
The timing for Sophie and her cohorts was pretty poor. Their only crime of course was doing what my sister and I were attempting to do on the phone: keep our heads while all around us seemed to be descending into madness.
In her final hour, which began the moment she was convicted of high treason, Sophie turned to god, as she had done her entire life. What she did not do was turn to religion. First, she prayed for the restoration of higher humanity:
"My god, glorious father, transform this ground into fertile earth, so your seeds may not fall in vain. Let the longing grow for you the creator that they so often do not want to see. Amen."
She then asked the attending minister for god's blessing. He assented, set his right hand gently on the top of her head and said,
"May god the father bless you, who created you in his image. May god the son bless you, whose suffering and death redeems you. May god the holy spirit bless you, who leads you to his temple and hallows you. May the trinity judge you with mercy and grant you eternal life. Amen."
Religious or not, spiritual or not, this seems right - a little bit of peace and forgiveness for having lived a human life.
The minister closed, 'No one loves more than one who dies for friends. God is with you."
As the executioners cuffed and led Sophie to the guillotine (yes, guillotine!), she turned to her brother and Probst and said, 'Die Sonne scheint noch.' The sun is still shining.
Sophie said nothing ever again, but just try to stop lucky me and my lucky, lucky sister.
Not my sister's ideas. Those won't get her killed. No sirree. She lives in the United States in 2009, and no matter how locally unpopular her ideas are, the balance is weighted so heavily in her dissident favour that murdering her, on behalf of an individual or, worse, the state, would be seen as much more blasphemous than any blasphemy she could commit by sticking like mad, mad superglue to her crazy, crazy ideas.
Of course, my sister has no crazy ideas. She's a nurse, a mother of two rather sophisticated young adults and the wife of a hard-working, dedicated husband. She simply dared to speak her mind in the face of so much vitriolic disagreement in the low-key melees that sprung up all around her during the last US general election campaign.
The lunatic mother-woman stood there in the middle of Ohio and favoured Obama. Worse yet, she didn't care who knew it. Even so, she and I spent hours on the phone in the weeks leading up to the polling - so many hours that we were equally worried about making our mortgage payments when the bills arrived.
We spent that much time on the phone together because she was concerned - especially at the beginning of it all - that she had gone legitimately mad. Her family members (apart from me, but I'm clearly insane, so what of it?), some friends, people with whom she shared rides to work, people at work, her former in-laws and every nature of shopkeeper, beekeeper, newspaper delivery boy and local shepherd called her everything but white (which is technically incorrect and vastly irrelevant) upon discovery of the fact that she was in favour of the man who eventually became the 44th President of the United States becoming the 44th President of the United States.
Imagine the balls on the silly cow! But I oxymoronically digress.
My sister endured endless, pointless arguments, jibes, name-calling (really!) and accusations that consisted mainly of assertions that she was a terrorist. How on earth could she justify voting for one otherwise? She must be anti-America, anti-freedom, anti-Christian, etc., because she supported an anti-American etc. candidate. Of course, at the root of every one of these horrible diatribes was racism - and racism that wasn't very cheerfully tarted up at that.
Even so, if you go to the supermarket one day, and all the other shoppers tell you that red grapes are poisonous, there's a little part of you that doubts what you thought unassailable. Then you look at those grapes differently for the second or two before you slap yourself back to reality and put a bunch in your basket.
And so we talked and talked, reminding each other that it was better to be hopeful rather than nihilistic, hopeful rather than fearful, hopeful rather than racist. We talked and we talked and we talked, and no one killed us.
We're lucky, and I knew that. Until I watched the German film 'Sophie Scholl' a few days ago, I had only a rough idea of how incredibly lucky we are.
The film is a dramatic retelling of the arrest, trial and execution of Sophie Scholl, her brother Hans and Christoph Probst, three Bavarian students who, as three-fifths of the White Rose, peacefully resisted the Nazis near the end of World War II using the written word and nothing else. They observed what was happening around them, bought a typewriter, paper and stamps, started telling the truth and paid with their lives. Sounds to me as though they were asking for it.
Many ordinary Germans were in the same two-holed boat but didn't have the spirit to proceed. They had lost the right to talk against the grain, and they were about to lose their country. The most rudimentary of moral codes had been replaced in an official capacity with an umbrella of despotic delusion in the face of the start of the decline of fascism in Europe, which is to say the fall of the Axis. That five students were able to cause so much trouble for the Nazis using a typewriter and the postal service is remarkable.
The timing for Sophie and her cohorts was pretty poor. Their only crime of course was doing what my sister and I were attempting to do on the phone: keep our heads while all around us seemed to be descending into madness.
In her final hour, which began the moment she was convicted of high treason, Sophie turned to god, as she had done her entire life. What she did not do was turn to religion. First, she prayed for the restoration of higher humanity:
"My god, glorious father, transform this ground into fertile earth, so your seeds may not fall in vain. Let the longing grow for you the creator that they so often do not want to see. Amen."
She then asked the attending minister for god's blessing. He assented, set his right hand gently on the top of her head and said,
"May god the father bless you, who created you in his image. May god the son bless you, whose suffering and death redeems you. May god the holy spirit bless you, who leads you to his temple and hallows you. May the trinity judge you with mercy and grant you eternal life. Amen."
Religious or not, spiritual or not, this seems right - a little bit of peace and forgiveness for having lived a human life.
The minister closed, 'No one loves more than one who dies for friends. God is with you."
As the executioners cuffed and led Sophie to the guillotine (yes, guillotine!), she turned to her brother and Probst and said, 'Die Sonne scheint noch.' The sun is still shining.
Sophie said nothing ever again, but just try to stop lucky me and my lucky, lucky sister.
Thursday, 19 March 2009
Pounded into dust
In the 'Stonecutters' episode of the Simpsons, the merrymaking secret club members sit enrobed round a long dining table, brandishing steins sloshing something akin to mead (no doubt), singing a song. As is the case with most devotees of this seminal American television classic, I've seen the episode probably 34 times. However, for the first 30 or so, I was certain these were the lyrics:
"Who controls the British pound?/Who keeps the metric system down?/We do./We do."
Purist devotees with their mouths now hanging open will have instantly recognised my error, for the actual lyric is not "Who controls the British pound?," but "Who controls the British crown?" Sorry. I have other things to do much of the time or have been so busy laughing at whatever verse precedes these lines, or have simply been too drunk, to notice what was actually being sung.
It was slightly disappointing to hear the lyric properly upon listening number 31. After all, wouldn't it be much more impressive to be the authority that determines the value of the British pound, for the power of the British crown, as limited as it is, rests firmly on the national currency?
In 1998, I quit my job with the New York City Department of Health, dusted off my only credit card (for some reason, I've got five or six now, even though I still only use one) and booked my first ever flight to Britain. As a leaving gift, my former colleagues had scraped together a couple hundred US dollars, god bless them, and the project director, my former boss, arranged to have them gift wrapped into two $100 American Express Travelers Cheques (not Travellers Cheques, mind, because these were US dollar instruments). So long, I thought, and thanks for all the fish.
I'd never been abroad, apart from Canada and Mexico, but even in my state of naive grace, I knew that US dollars wouldn't cut the hot yellow mustard in the UK. I knew nothing about the British currency other than the name of it, and I wasn't sure what to do about converting the Cheques into money I could use at my destination.
One day, I passed a hole in the wall in downtown Manhattan not far from my office with the words 'Foreign Exchange' stuck to some bullet-proof glass, along with some other words I struggled to understand, 'Cambio' and 'Wechsel' among them. I proudly hopped up to the window, my $200 in Cheques in hand, and asked of the fellow seated beyond, 'Can I please exchange these for British pounds?'
'Sorry,' said the obviously British person seated across the divide, 'Did you want to convert these to English pounds?' I replied, 'Yes, English pounds, please.'
Was there a difference? Even then, I thought he was pulling the wool. I understood roughly the makeup of the United Kingdom and was certain there was a single currency that was legal tender in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland - but how certain was I really, and was this a battle I should fight? I let him have his way, although I now know beyond doubt the guy was just being an English bitch who hated his job.
'You'll have to endorse them. Sign them in the proper place and put them through the window.' Exactly where the proper place was, I couldn't say. Then I made my first fatal error in dealing with an Englishman: I showed any form of ignorance whatsoever.
'I'm not sure where to sign. Can you show me please?'
'Just there in the upper right - no, no - the other right. Yes, there. And then again in the...'
'Where? Here where there's a blank line?'
'No, no, that's completely the wrong place.'
'Well, where, then?' I wanted to end with 'you gaping, pompous asshole's first cousin' but figured I'd err on the side of diplomacy. I pointed to another likely spot on the paper.
'No.'
And one more.
'Yes, that's it. Sign there and put them through the window. Here.' He smiled and actually pointed at the curved trough under the glass, and my second lesson was complete: These people are impossible, but annoyingly polite while being so.
As if that weren't sufficiently humiliating, he slipped a few horribly wrinkled but refreshingly colourful notes under the glass. When I counted them, I discovered the third horrible truth of things British: Their money was worth more than ours was. Even in March, 1998 rates, my $200 barely fetched £110 after commission and service charges. I knew then it was going to be a shorter, more frugal holiday than I'd hoped.
When I moved to Britain two years later, I began to handle the pound on a daily basis. Although I intended to understand the currency on its own terms and get a grip on the costs of everyday items instantly, I found that my interpretation of the value of things was only possible by mentally converting to the dollar. This kept me busy probably two to three hours a day at first. A litre of milk, a loaf of bread, a return journey on the Underground, a newspaper: the value of none of these made sense for the first year I lived in London without knowing the number to multiply by in order to get back to the once-almighty US dollar. Ultimately, the exercise served no purpose other than making me angry, for everything cost on average roughly twice what I was accustomed to paying for it, even in New York.
The British pound, a yellowish, thick coin, began to take on a tactile life all its own when I held it in my hand. The double meaning became concrete: The British pound not only 'weighed' more, but it also literally weighed more, each piss-coloured coin a dense reminder that I felt ripped off nearly every time I handed one over. It became a currency of bitterness and intimidation, probably because it took the place of imperial bullets in the national power psyche.
As I advanced in my career, and my income increased, the pound stopped being a horrible little coin and turned into a weapon of foreign dominance that could be pointed right back down the barrel into the face of the new imperial kid on the block: The United States of America. At no time was I more comfortable with the prospect of returning home to financially conquer and take over, say, Nebraska than I was during my last visit to the hinterland in December, 2007.
I had had a good year professionally. The pounds weighing down my pockets, I visited the economically downtrodden scene of my childhood, Ohio, with the fattest piece of luggage I could find at the July sales at House of Fraser. I could have smuggled three illegal workers in that bag, and, when I boarded the plane for my outbound journey, I made sure it was only one-third full, leaving lots of room for fur coats and diamonds.
I budgeted £500 to spend on swag. I only managed to plough through £310, including an extra bag that I bought to increase the volume of my purchases, and was finally limited in what I could buy only by my own physical strength. At $2.05 to the pound, I literally couldn't carry any more back to London. Good times indeed.
And now, a year later, as I've watched the world's financial system implode upon its big, fat self, I'm back to roughly square one. The pound today is worth only $1.50, crash diving back to its late-2000 level. The rent for the stupid storage box my ex and I have maintained in Queens, New York since we moved abroad has suddenly jumped to more than £60 a month, a figure large enough to register on the radar screen of my personal finances. Throughout 2007, it never cost more than £45. I'd love to think about having all those long-forgotten effects shipped to London once and for all, but it would cost nearly £1,000 to do it now. Last year, it was more like £700. Shoulda, shoulda, shoulda.
I'll be the first to admit I don't understand how currencies float on the world's foreign exchanges. Nor do I know why we use the word 'float' to describe the phenomenon. I only know that as soon as I got a grip on the system, and felt as though perhaps history was for once organically meshing with my life, someone or something had to come along and bollocks it up.
Who controls the British pound? I don't. I don't.
"Who controls the British pound?/Who keeps the metric system down?/We do./We do."
Purist devotees with their mouths now hanging open will have instantly recognised my error, for the actual lyric is not "Who controls the British pound?," but "Who controls the British crown?" Sorry. I have other things to do much of the time or have been so busy laughing at whatever verse precedes these lines, or have simply been too drunk, to notice what was actually being sung.
It was slightly disappointing to hear the lyric properly upon listening number 31. After all, wouldn't it be much more impressive to be the authority that determines the value of the British pound, for the power of the British crown, as limited as it is, rests firmly on the national currency?
In 1998, I quit my job with the New York City Department of Health, dusted off my only credit card (for some reason, I've got five or six now, even though I still only use one) and booked my first ever flight to Britain. As a leaving gift, my former colleagues had scraped together a couple hundred US dollars, god bless them, and the project director, my former boss, arranged to have them gift wrapped into two $100 American Express Travelers Cheques (not Travellers Cheques, mind, because these were US dollar instruments). So long, I thought, and thanks for all the fish.
I'd never been abroad, apart from Canada and Mexico, but even in my state of naive grace, I knew that US dollars wouldn't cut the hot yellow mustard in the UK. I knew nothing about the British currency other than the name of it, and I wasn't sure what to do about converting the Cheques into money I could use at my destination.
One day, I passed a hole in the wall in downtown Manhattan not far from my office with the words 'Foreign Exchange' stuck to some bullet-proof glass, along with some other words I struggled to understand, 'Cambio' and 'Wechsel' among them. I proudly hopped up to the window, my $200 in Cheques in hand, and asked of the fellow seated beyond, 'Can I please exchange these for British pounds?'
'Sorry,' said the obviously British person seated across the divide, 'Did you want to convert these to English pounds?' I replied, 'Yes, English pounds, please.'
Was there a difference? Even then, I thought he was pulling the wool. I understood roughly the makeup of the United Kingdom and was certain there was a single currency that was legal tender in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland - but how certain was I really, and was this a battle I should fight? I let him have his way, although I now know beyond doubt the guy was just being an English bitch who hated his job.
'You'll have to endorse them. Sign them in the proper place and put them through the window.' Exactly where the proper place was, I couldn't say. Then I made my first fatal error in dealing with an Englishman: I showed any form of ignorance whatsoever.
'I'm not sure where to sign. Can you show me please?'
'Just there in the upper right - no, no - the other right. Yes, there. And then again in the...'
'Where? Here where there's a blank line?'
'No, no, that's completely the wrong place.'
'Well, where, then?' I wanted to end with 'you gaping, pompous asshole's first cousin' but figured I'd err on the side of diplomacy. I pointed to another likely spot on the paper.
'No.'
And one more.
'Yes, that's it. Sign there and put them through the window. Here.' He smiled and actually pointed at the curved trough under the glass, and my second lesson was complete: These people are impossible, but annoyingly polite while being so.
As if that weren't sufficiently humiliating, he slipped a few horribly wrinkled but refreshingly colourful notes under the glass. When I counted them, I discovered the third horrible truth of things British: Their money was worth more than ours was. Even in March, 1998 rates, my $200 barely fetched £110 after commission and service charges. I knew then it was going to be a shorter, more frugal holiday than I'd hoped.
When I moved to Britain two years later, I began to handle the pound on a daily basis. Although I intended to understand the currency on its own terms and get a grip on the costs of everyday items instantly, I found that my interpretation of the value of things was only possible by mentally converting to the dollar. This kept me busy probably two to three hours a day at first. A litre of milk, a loaf of bread, a return journey on the Underground, a newspaper: the value of none of these made sense for the first year I lived in London without knowing the number to multiply by in order to get back to the once-almighty US dollar. Ultimately, the exercise served no purpose other than making me angry, for everything cost on average roughly twice what I was accustomed to paying for it, even in New York.
The British pound, a yellowish, thick coin, began to take on a tactile life all its own when I held it in my hand. The double meaning became concrete: The British pound not only 'weighed' more, but it also literally weighed more, each piss-coloured coin a dense reminder that I felt ripped off nearly every time I handed one over. It became a currency of bitterness and intimidation, probably because it took the place of imperial bullets in the national power psyche.
As I advanced in my career, and my income increased, the pound stopped being a horrible little coin and turned into a weapon of foreign dominance that could be pointed right back down the barrel into the face of the new imperial kid on the block: The United States of America. At no time was I more comfortable with the prospect of returning home to financially conquer and take over, say, Nebraska than I was during my last visit to the hinterland in December, 2007.
I had had a good year professionally. The pounds weighing down my pockets, I visited the economically downtrodden scene of my childhood, Ohio, with the fattest piece of luggage I could find at the July sales at House of Fraser. I could have smuggled three illegal workers in that bag, and, when I boarded the plane for my outbound journey, I made sure it was only one-third full, leaving lots of room for fur coats and diamonds.
I budgeted £500 to spend on swag. I only managed to plough through £310, including an extra bag that I bought to increase the volume of my purchases, and was finally limited in what I could buy only by my own physical strength. At $2.05 to the pound, I literally couldn't carry any more back to London. Good times indeed.
And now, a year later, as I've watched the world's financial system implode upon its big, fat self, I'm back to roughly square one. The pound today is worth only $1.50, crash diving back to its late-2000 level. The rent for the stupid storage box my ex and I have maintained in Queens, New York since we moved abroad has suddenly jumped to more than £60 a month, a figure large enough to register on the radar screen of my personal finances. Throughout 2007, it never cost more than £45. I'd love to think about having all those long-forgotten effects shipped to London once and for all, but it would cost nearly £1,000 to do it now. Last year, it was more like £700. Shoulda, shoulda, shoulda.
I'll be the first to admit I don't understand how currencies float on the world's foreign exchanges. Nor do I know why we use the word 'float' to describe the phenomenon. I only know that as soon as I got a grip on the system, and felt as though perhaps history was for once organically meshing with my life, someone or something had to come along and bollocks it up.
Who controls the British pound? I don't. I don't.
Thursday, 16 October 2008
He will (most likely) not be English
It is widely held amongst gay brethren in the immigrant community in London, and by 'widely' I mean 'nearly to a man,' that the best way to confuse, frustrate and perhaps even self-flagellate the living daylights out of one's self - while earning a constantly diminishing return on social investment and losing faith in the general good of humanity - is to date Englishmen. I was not afforded the luxury of tasting the wisdom of these grapes through the generosity of the vine: Unfortunately, I came into this most saddening and perhaps ultimately defeatist piece of vital information empirically.
I've lived in London a shave under eight years, and I've attempted to date several gay Englishmen. I've also studied, from a fairly sturdy North American point of view, the social culture of this country shaped like a sitting person facing to the left (England, not the UK). All I can say about it is that I've never been more consistently dumbfounded by such consistent misbehaviour. And, like a kicked dog emulating a boomerang, I'm still gathering data but learning next to nothing.
Even so, out of moral obligation to anyone who may wish to know, or need to commiserate, I feel I should share the evidence. How you prosecute is up to you. So grab a bottle of red, a score card and sit somewhere comfortable.
Of all human realities, the one whose execution dogs the civilised and polite more than any other is that it is painfully difficult to reconcile the need to let another down. When I have had to do it, I have as a rule listed alternative compensatory actions that I'd rather undertake, simply because they'd be easier: Nailing my hand to a desktop, eating a box of razor blades, stepping on a mewling kitten with golf shoes, e.g. But the act of disappointing another by natural law accompanies socialising of virtually every stripe, and therefore must be acknowledged, accepted and swiftly but surely - but most of all kindly - carried out. I have, to the best of my ability, always tried to do so.
The reasons are twofold: The first is that it's a despicable crime against the self to continue an association that affronts inner harmony (i.e., the alignment of feeling, thought and action). And the other is that stringing someone along is simply a lousy, selfish thing to do. However, it is the ingrained, inexorable, infuriating way of, in my experience, better than 97% of gay Englishmen to ignore these two simple truths in their entirety, especially the latter.
Here's a typical scenario: Meet an attractive Englishman. They're socially very tolerant, often polite to a self-immolating fault and more falsely amiable than any American bidding you 'Have a nice day.' So approach with caution, but be fooled by their charms anyway.
Next, ask him out on a date. He'll say 'yes,' in my experience, about 99 out of 100 times, even if he'd rather step on a mewling kitten etc. It's what he's been trained to do in his childhood home, at school, at the office, in his granny's parlour, at the side of his granddad's death bed and in every other waking, and no doubt many sleeping, moments. It would require hypnotic, drug-enforced, Nazi-sponsored re-education in order for him to respond as he would genuinely prefer, if only he were still able to entertain exactly what it is he does prefer.
Then go on the date. It will most likely be pleasant, if not better than that, and you may arrange a second date at the end of the first. You may even go on the second, and third and fourth and many, many other dates. All will seem to be going swimmingly.
Eventually, however, the water will vanish beneath you as though someone had opened a plug hole the size of Surrey in a riverbed. You will ring to arrange your sixth, or tenth, or twenty-third date, and his voicemail will answer. In most cases, that will be the last you hear of his voice, if he had been thoughtful enough to record an outgoing message.
My American friend M turned up one night at a pub to meet me several months ago. M is in his late 30s, has an MBA, a great job, a physique most gay men dream of achieving and/or getting next to and a wonderfully understated wit. He is, by most measures, a catch. He is a good friend, although the rigours of his work have kept him from getting out much. Even so, I am normally aware of his significant life developments.
He sat down that night and wore a face that signaled either that he'd lost his job or that someone had stolen his bicycle.
"What's up, M?" I asked him.
"I just got dumped," he said, "by this guy I'd been dating for the past four months."
This is a good time to point out a wonderful adaptive mechanism many of us use to try to cope with the rocky waves that dating a Limey kicks up. It is akin to a strategy embraced by many pregnant women, who, for at least a trimester, withhold the good news of their pregnancy in case they should tell everyone they know, only to see the worst happen. Fortunately for pregnant women, the odds of their carriage going beyond the first three months are about 1,274,988 times greater than reaching the same milestone when dating a gay Englishman.
And God bless M for trying.
"I didn't even know you were dating anyone!" I blurted. "So who is this guy? What happened?"
Then I asked my new standard form question number three: "Was he English?"
You bet he was, and four months later, the voicemail hex was cast. In this case, it was even more egregious: he ended with M via text message. No matter the form, the terminus is always unexpected and painfully disappointing, like the day the gene that controls a debilitating hereditary disease you didn't know you were carrying suddenly switches on, and you're left to deal with whatever horror until it kills you - and that's that.
I've dated the Englishman who, for three months, enjoyed every second of our physical relationship until one afternoon, when it simply all stopped. I didn't realise it had stopped until he turned up at my birthday do three hours late, then left an hour later. Sometimes people lose interest. That's fine. What is not fine is being intimate with someone for 90 more or less consecutive days, then not being kind or strong enough to say "I'm sorry, but something's changed, and I don't want to do this anymore."
I've dated the Englishman who seemed keen as Christmas for two months, and with whom I thought I was falling in love, who told me in the end that the timing was off. I found out a few months later when I stumbled upon his profile on a dating website that I was neither equipped with the physique in which he was interested nor in tune with his sexual proclivities, both of which he'd neglected to mention anywhere along the way. Timing indeed.
I've tried to date the Englishman with whom I had one whirlwind 24-hour date, during which he indicated in every manner of word and deed that he was as comfortable and happy spending time with me as I was with him. (He did, after all, spend the night and the next eight waking hours with me in my flat.) When I sent him a text message asking about anything other than getting together again, he replied. When I sent him a text message or left a voice message asking about getting together again, he didn't reply until I sent the next text message about something else again. I couldn't determine if he wanted simply to pursue a light epistolary relationship, or any relationship at all, and gave up after the third try. Communicating with many species of lower vertebrates is easier and often more fulfilling.
Etc.
There are times of course when I wonder if I've become unfairly jaded towards an ethnicity of men in particular while ignoring the sheer difficulty of being human generally. But I don't think so. I've not faced the same issue with Welshmen, Scotsmen or Irishmen, whether Northern or southern. Europeans have generally also let me know where I've stood.
All that I can potentially deduce from my experiences with Englishmen is that actions, and even inactions, speak more loudly than Englishmen are permitted to. So if I have any useful advice, it would be this: Take an Englishman's deeds at face value. If they don't engage, leave them alone and go date someone else - or strike up a conversation with a cat. If an Englishman does engage, you're in there until he doesn't engage. But never, never ever should you expect a straightforward, spoken affirmation or refutation. You'll not hear from an Englishman's lips any of the following simple statements:
"That would be nice, but not with you."
"This just isn't going to work for me."
"I do like you, but not in that way."
Or most simply of all,
"No, but thank you all the same."
When dealing with Englishmen, there is only one reliable truth: "nothing" actually means "no." Vacuums are in fact empty spaces. Silence is indeed the lack of sound. Accept this, and it might just get you through.
I'd like to invite Englishmen to prove me wrong, but waiting for that Godot will all but ensure I have no social life at all.
I've lived in London a shave under eight years, and I've attempted to date several gay Englishmen. I've also studied, from a fairly sturdy North American point of view, the social culture of this country shaped like a sitting person facing to the left (England, not the UK). All I can say about it is that I've never been more consistently dumbfounded by such consistent misbehaviour. And, like a kicked dog emulating a boomerang, I'm still gathering data but learning next to nothing.
Even so, out of moral obligation to anyone who may wish to know, or need to commiserate, I feel I should share the evidence. How you prosecute is up to you. So grab a bottle of red, a score card and sit somewhere comfortable.
Of all human realities, the one whose execution dogs the civilised and polite more than any other is that it is painfully difficult to reconcile the need to let another down. When I have had to do it, I have as a rule listed alternative compensatory actions that I'd rather undertake, simply because they'd be easier: Nailing my hand to a desktop, eating a box of razor blades, stepping on a mewling kitten with golf shoes, e.g. But the act of disappointing another by natural law accompanies socialising of virtually every stripe, and therefore must be acknowledged, accepted and swiftly but surely - but most of all kindly - carried out. I have, to the best of my ability, always tried to do so.
The reasons are twofold: The first is that it's a despicable crime against the self to continue an association that affronts inner harmony (i.e., the alignment of feeling, thought and action). And the other is that stringing someone along is simply a lousy, selfish thing to do. However, it is the ingrained, inexorable, infuriating way of, in my experience, better than 97% of gay Englishmen to ignore these two simple truths in their entirety, especially the latter.
Here's a typical scenario: Meet an attractive Englishman. They're socially very tolerant, often polite to a self-immolating fault and more falsely amiable than any American bidding you 'Have a nice day.' So approach with caution, but be fooled by their charms anyway.
Next, ask him out on a date. He'll say 'yes,' in my experience, about 99 out of 100 times, even if he'd rather step on a mewling kitten etc. It's what he's been trained to do in his childhood home, at school, at the office, in his granny's parlour, at the side of his granddad's death bed and in every other waking, and no doubt many sleeping, moments. It would require hypnotic, drug-enforced, Nazi-sponsored re-education in order for him to respond as he would genuinely prefer, if only he were still able to entertain exactly what it is he does prefer.
Then go on the date. It will most likely be pleasant, if not better than that, and you may arrange a second date at the end of the first. You may even go on the second, and third and fourth and many, many other dates. All will seem to be going swimmingly.
Eventually, however, the water will vanish beneath you as though someone had opened a plug hole the size of Surrey in a riverbed. You will ring to arrange your sixth, or tenth, or twenty-third date, and his voicemail will answer. In most cases, that will be the last you hear of his voice, if he had been thoughtful enough to record an outgoing message.
My American friend M turned up one night at a pub to meet me several months ago. M is in his late 30s, has an MBA, a great job, a physique most gay men dream of achieving and/or getting next to and a wonderfully understated wit. He is, by most measures, a catch. He is a good friend, although the rigours of his work have kept him from getting out much. Even so, I am normally aware of his significant life developments.
He sat down that night and wore a face that signaled either that he'd lost his job or that someone had stolen his bicycle.
"What's up, M?" I asked him.
"I just got dumped," he said, "by this guy I'd been dating for the past four months."
This is a good time to point out a wonderful adaptive mechanism many of us use to try to cope with the rocky waves that dating a Limey kicks up. It is akin to a strategy embraced by many pregnant women, who, for at least a trimester, withhold the good news of their pregnancy in case they should tell everyone they know, only to see the worst happen. Fortunately for pregnant women, the odds of their carriage going beyond the first three months are about 1,274,988 times greater than reaching the same milestone when dating a gay Englishman.
And God bless M for trying.
"I didn't even know you were dating anyone!" I blurted. "So who is this guy? What happened?"
Then I asked my new standard form question number three: "Was he English?"
You bet he was, and four months later, the voicemail hex was cast. In this case, it was even more egregious: he ended with M via text message. No matter the form, the terminus is always unexpected and painfully disappointing, like the day the gene that controls a debilitating hereditary disease you didn't know you were carrying suddenly switches on, and you're left to deal with whatever horror until it kills you - and that's that.
I've dated the Englishman who, for three months, enjoyed every second of our physical relationship until one afternoon, when it simply all stopped. I didn't realise it had stopped until he turned up at my birthday do three hours late, then left an hour later. Sometimes people lose interest. That's fine. What is not fine is being intimate with someone for 90 more or less consecutive days, then not being kind or strong enough to say "I'm sorry, but something's changed, and I don't want to do this anymore."
I've dated the Englishman who seemed keen as Christmas for two months, and with whom I thought I was falling in love, who told me in the end that the timing was off. I found out a few months later when I stumbled upon his profile on a dating website that I was neither equipped with the physique in which he was interested nor in tune with his sexual proclivities, both of which he'd neglected to mention anywhere along the way. Timing indeed.
I've tried to date the Englishman with whom I had one whirlwind 24-hour date, during which he indicated in every manner of word and deed that he was as comfortable and happy spending time with me as I was with him. (He did, after all, spend the night and the next eight waking hours with me in my flat.) When I sent him a text message asking about anything other than getting together again, he replied. When I sent him a text message or left a voice message asking about getting together again, he didn't reply until I sent the next text message about something else again. I couldn't determine if he wanted simply to pursue a light epistolary relationship, or any relationship at all, and gave up after the third try. Communicating with many species of lower vertebrates is easier and often more fulfilling.
Etc.
There are times of course when I wonder if I've become unfairly jaded towards an ethnicity of men in particular while ignoring the sheer difficulty of being human generally. But I don't think so. I've not faced the same issue with Welshmen, Scotsmen or Irishmen, whether Northern or southern. Europeans have generally also let me know where I've stood.
All that I can potentially deduce from my experiences with Englishmen is that actions, and even inactions, speak more loudly than Englishmen are permitted to. So if I have any useful advice, it would be this: Take an Englishman's deeds at face value. If they don't engage, leave them alone and go date someone else - or strike up a conversation with a cat. If an Englishman does engage, you're in there until he doesn't engage. But never, never ever should you expect a straightforward, spoken affirmation or refutation. You'll not hear from an Englishman's lips any of the following simple statements:
"That would be nice, but not with you."
"This just isn't going to work for me."
"I do like you, but not in that way."
Or most simply of all,
"No, but thank you all the same."
When dealing with Englishmen, there is only one reliable truth: "nothing" actually means "no." Vacuums are in fact empty spaces. Silence is indeed the lack of sound. Accept this, and it might just get you through.
I'd like to invite Englishmen to prove me wrong, but waiting for that Godot will all but ensure I have no social life at all.
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