Putting Off (Off-putting).

"... and in that way, he would say, one can live."

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Postscript:   Truth be told there's a corollary - one gets peevish at times, quite mean spirited and, "looks up to curse" as Steve Smith put it in 'God's Kaliedescope'; or (in a more secular time) over, or across and down, looks somewhere else to curse; but yes, curses.   ;-) When you get to the food bank there is no choice, very little interaction of any kind in fact. I look for an instant at the guy running the show but he's obviously angry and, I don't know why so I turn away. There's some kind of a line and I'm blocking it. A woman with a bright blue plastic apron asks me if I need food. That's not really why I've come but yes, I also need food, so that's what I wind up getting. Very similar to the welfare office in that way: you go in wondering if there's any help and wind up getting money which doesn't really do it. The man who registers me asks if I have any income. He's been instructed to get proof but seems to intuitively recognize the difficulties of proving a negative and so smiles at me, and before we know it he's telling me his story instead. It's his first time too so I guess I'm lucky. It would be fine (I suppose) if it were enough money and food to live, but it's not. There was a torture machine called 'le petit aise' and this could be it. I sit waiting with some others for my number to be called. There's no talk. She calls the number, drops a box on the table, takes my number stick (the numbers are written on tongue depressors) and goes into the back again to fill another box. I pack it up and leave carrying a bag, mostly canned stuff so it's heavy. There are two streetcars back-to-back at the light and by jaywalking I manage to get aboard the second one. The driver is a black woman who laughs with me when I thank her for being so perfectly on time. [Not me. I have no degree, no credentials of any kind, no reason to be believed beyond whatever you may imagine for yourself.] Certainly it must be patho-psychology, an abnormal condition. Someone studying such things might be able to identify it, name it, and provide ... aetiology, suggested therapies, probable outcomes and what not. Me?     ...     I've just noticed a progressive putting off, beginning years ago with leaving things behind: houses, cars, furniture, books and papers, and proceeding step-wise up or down (depending on how you visualize) to going outside only when necessary, making do, avoiding even the basics: teeth-brushing, bathing, eating, moving, waking. And people, pick up on this kind of state right away - it 'pours off you' as someone said to me once about something else - and they find it ... off-putting. I stopped cleaning toilets at some point. The (Christian) real-estate agent in Houston sends me a vehement email explaining his refusal to refund my deposit (which I have not asked for) with a digital photograph of the scale in the toilet and a complaint that he has had to replace 'the fixture' (which I do not believe). He doesn't mention all the brand-new top-of-the-line furniture left behind. Maybe the name is a word like 'anhedonia' ... but not that particular one because, I'm not unhappy. There is joy, often, coming upon the singing cashier f'rinstance (see below). I wake singing almost every morning and the tune rattles merrily around my brain all day long, sometimes for weeks on end, even when the song is a sad one. Today it's the Stones' 'Love in Vain', and later on Paul Simon's 'Bridge over Troubled Waters'. Why don't you put    Why don't you put     Why don't you put    Why don't you put   Who are you your memories         your metaphors         your jaws                your molecules        really? on paper?                on the clothesline?     in the barrel?           in a credit rating?     I'm not shouting. Gerry M. told me - way back in 1968 - that my personality was full of 'holes you could drive a truck through'. I didn't know then what he meant but, I remembered. He died ten years ago and someone said to me, "Aren't you going to the funeral?" I said, "No. The last time I saw him he told me to go away and not come back." Now, with Dunning-Kruger (more on Dunning-Kruger another time) in the mix I have, at least, a glimmering. I wish I'd understood him at the time. There's lots of it going around. Part of the problem is that there are more good speakers & writers than good listeners & critics; part of it is the malignant Internet 'hurry', 'bustle', (blizzard?) around deadlines and the continuous quest for novelty; part of it is human fallibility (on both sides); and there are other parts too: Here's what I would call a flawed argument for rewilding, maybe not flawed but incomplete, or the O Henry twist at the end goes the wrong way, something like that. And another one (timed a few weeks before the anniversary of Malcolm's murder): Malcolm X Was Right About America by Chris Hedges - such a comprehensive and well written piece except that it fails (for me, somehow, again towards the end) to get to the point and moves off instead into irrelevancies. He starts out with "Malcolm was right" and ends with ... sincerity? "The price of freedom is death," (?). Say wha? You remember Giles Frazer. He's the fellow who quit a senior 'position' with the Anglicans over their un-Christian response to Occupy at St. Paul's in London. In this piece he writes clearly about the circus part of 'panem et circenses' and then comes round (weakly it seems to me) with "Who would have guessed?". Who indeed? Well, perhaps anyone who thought about the 'industrial scale' butchery in Flanders during WW1. The only hint that the writer of the article on the personal debt crisis sees through it is when she qualifies the term 'downward spiral' with "according to Ms. Lund," (Ms. Lund being one of the authors of the report the article is about). Otherwise it is all Rah! Rah! Growth and hand-wringing over any jeopardy. I read to the end hoping for another glimmering but there's none. It's hard to say just what Bruce Anderson has in mind? He forecasts "a pretty good scrap about this issue [carbon pricing]" but follows it with "once again". I guess he's referring to Stéphane Dion's Green Shift but it's not clear. To my mind there is yet to be any 'scrap' whatsoever on this issue and the notion that Justin Sinclair will take any realistic part of one if it happens is ... ludicrous. Anyway ... this guy thinks John Bennett is on the fringe - he has evidently not been out there to have a look around and see. (Ah! As I go back to find the URL for the link I see that it has changed. He has been asked to edit it. I wonder why? If I remember I will post both versions somewhere later on.) A slave in Egypt says, "I have been a stranger in a strange land," and doesn't know the half of it. What a (long strange) trip it will be up to the height of Pisgah and down again. The rivers of Babylon fit in there somewhere too, and the promised land of milk and honey is now an electrified mine field and we're back in Flanders again - with improved technology. They say, "The truth will out." It won't. It doesn't. They say, "Home is where they have to take you in when you have to go there." Not so. "Some say the world will end in fire, some say ice," (and some, dear Robert, just say the world will end, and weep). In extremis the victims (if that's what they are) don't care who they tell - strangers at bus stops. And people tend to keep their distance because, once these damn crazies get started the yackety-yacking is hard to turn off or get away from (and anyway there's an apparently concomitant lack of personal hygiene and they may smell a bit). The old man getting up onto the streetcar in front of me has pissed himself. I want to tell him something, comforting, understanding, say to him "It's OK," (when it evidently is not), but when I put my ticket in the slot and turn around he's gone. We are stopped and I'm giving TTC tickets to my sisters in the entrance to the subway - a year or so ago, not very long after Vince died - and a man comes up and asks "Is there a 'problem here?" He has picked up whatever it is from a distance, something in our body language. He imagines (I guess) that I'm importuning. There are two women with him as well, waiting on the sidelines. They (my sisters) both deny it ever happened when I ask them later what they think of it. Another day, recently, in the park I twice say to passers-by "What a beautiful day," (and it is - ! - sunny and snowy and breezy and cold) and twice get scowled at. While someone else meets Jane Jacobs in a park in the middle of the night and hands over her baby to be quieted. Go figgure. The author has posted a copy on her website without ever (apparently) re-reading it to see the typos. Decades ago I'm in the middle of a brutal divorce (or at the beginning perhaps, the very 'setting out' - since these things never end). I stay up all night till dawn writing a love letter to her. As I mail it I think, "Now she'll see." But it turns up instead in the evidence for the prosecution - as proof of my constant malignant manipulation. Hey, you! Tell me                         I can't. Lies are never charming.     That doesn't matter. Tell me a a charming lie.                            They usually bring pain and shame.         charming lie. Another one?   When the kids were small we had an aquarium. At first we half-filled it with sand and kept gerbils. When there got to be too many we let them go into the bushes along the backyard fence. The neighbour's cat sat on a post watching, tail twitching, for days after. Then it was guppies. I called it 'therapy', sitting in front of the tank staring into it when the kids weren't there. My daughter came home from school one day with a tiny turtle the size of a quarter in a jam jar. We organized a pile of rocks for it to climb out onto. By the time the courts & lawyers had worked their jigs and reels and the kids were gone the turtle was grown way too big for for the tank. When I burned all the furniture and stuff from the farm house I let it go into the pond. Now I keep five neon & rainbow tetras in another tank large enough to lose myself in. I feed them every day but they hardly touch it. At first I thought they might starve but it's been going on for several years. They seem happy enough. A schooling breed, they move as a squadron most of the time - I assume this means they're happy, or not unhappy - however one names the mind-states of fish. I wonder why they keep on living ... but they do. And then I wonder how you know if something is alive at all? A sort of Turing Test maybe? And then, next, wondering how one recognizes spirit? Bathos: Ludicrous descent from the elevated to the commonplace in writing or speech; anticlimax; a ‘come-down’. Pathos: That quality in speech, writing, music, or artistic representation which excites a feeling of pity or sadness; power of stirring tender or melancholy emotion; pathetic or affecting character or influence. I've never been able to keep these two words straight. Now I see a memory-clue: 'bath' -> water -> deep water. Might work. "A thing so horrendous you cannot take it all in without becoming frenzied and hysterical and mad." (A statement by one of the characters in a downloaded TV program, I can't remember which one.) And then to be alone with it week after week, month after month, year after year in almost perfect solitude, perfect isolation. Everyone turning their backs and no one saying why, no one saying anything, until even this little Internet squeaking feels like no more than a vanishing point in some well hidden perspective (inside an enigma). After that it's comparatively easy, not so hard to bear my children not liking me anymore and making harsh judgements. A mere biological rudiment or some other simple explanation I'm sure. ... I did about the same to my own father (minus any judgement), ignored him. Must be that pesky Golden Rule again: What goes around comes around. Sometimes it feels black but it is surprising how little it takes to bring me 'round; don't take much at all; a cheap drunk, a pushover; but things are forgotten so easily these days; I have to write 'em down or they're gone ... Coming to the cash in a strange supermarket one afternoon I find the cashier singing and she smiles at me when I compliment her (somewhat extravagantly). Her fingernails are painted with day-glo glitter designs - the thumb in a different colour & pattern. A very skinny old man, emaciated, a stick figure, and a highschool girl with him at the streetcar stop. He is white and she is black and I can't guess how they've come together. And they are singing, very low, some pop tune I can't make out; and dancing - she moves her hips and he shuffles his feet (in odd, oversize boots) and nearly falls. She steadies him. His glasses are huge on his head and almost fall off. His head lolls back and his eyes roll down and he sees me watching. It is freezing cold and windy and they go inside the restauraunt to wait. I'm waiting for a bus one afternoon and I see a man I recognize walking on the other side of the street with a gym bag, must be on his way home from swimming. A tall man, old, white hair, and he walks ... crabwise - not staggering, but sort of zig zag down the sidewalk - arms ... flapping, bag and all, almost as if he were still swimming. I am so delighted to know him. I have screwed up the automated book checkout somehow and a librarian is doing the business. A rough sort of guy (but he doesn't look dangerous) approaches with a scrap of paper in his hand on which something is written. He smiles and wants me to read it. It's too small, very tiny writing; so, OK, I take out my glasses and put them on. "David," it says. "Is that your name?" I ask. He smiles and nods. "I happen to like that name," sez I. He takes the scrap and heads away out the door, satisfied. And then, after six years coming there day after day, one of the librarians volunteers her first name when I make a joke about her name tag. They all wear tags which all say 'Library' and I say somethng like "Funny name for a girl." And she even gives me a mental clue to remember it with. Wow. It has taken more than a year to figgure out that a prepaid cell phone might be the way to go. Someone has told me they have cheap ones at Walmart but I have no idea how to find a Walmart until I stumble into the old Zeller's one day and find it changed into one. So I go to the phone counter and a young man named Albert kindly takes the time to explain it all to me. $29 a month for lots of service and no strings if you have your own machine. Unfortunately it's too late even for $29 a month but I thank him for his time and he smiles and gives me his card. There is an old woman all in white (once in a while she is all in black but the outfits are ... expensive, coordinated sportswear ensembles) who regularly walks a fluffy tiny-little prancing dog in booties, also white. One day she looks up at me sitting smoking on the bench and calls over, "Nice day." "Yes," I answer, "It certainly is." Maybe I shouldn't write these things down, but they're important somehow and I forget so easily, and I want to store them up for another day when I may really need them. So. What drove Hal over the edge in Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece was (unwarranted, unjustified) secrecy; and we are back, full circle, to Blake's 'Poison Tree' and forebearance.         And if the old man climbed out of the cart and stretched himself (things were gathering pace now) and looked at where the pump had been that the soldiers had blown up so that nothing should be left standing, and complained, saying, "What are we going to do about water?,"  he, Michael K, would produce a teaspoon from his pocket, a teaspoon and a long roll of string.  He would clear the rubble from the mouth of the shaft, he would bend the handle of the teaspoon in a loop and tie the string to it, he would lower it down the shaft deep into the earth, and when he brought it up there would be water in the bowl of the spoon;  and in that way, he would say, one can live. J.M. Coetzee, 'The Life and Times of Michael K', final paragraph. Feliz niver querida. ... and don't forget - leeks tomorrow everyone!

 
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Shitholder.

Love has no pride.  
Hangin' by a thread.

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Here, listen to some'a this:                                   Who's gonna stand up?    Other versions: orchestral, With Crazy Horse, and solo.       A-and: Fork in the Road.

 

It seems obvious that Stephen Harper is the epitome rather than an exceptional case - from the election record alone. And Franklin, lost, maddened by the lead in his (then newly invented) tinned food, personifying all of us (including Stephen Harper) too accurately for comfort. As long as one is alive one has to be somewhere, doing something (even if it's nothing). This post will arrive in early December but it is being composed in mid-November because ... there's nothing else to do.

Pretence. I send my children away believing I am saving them, then sit in pubs all afternoon pretending to read newspapers and go in and out of cinemas until they close pretending to watch movies. Always buy two coffees and pretend to be taking one for an imaginary friend. Pretend to be sitting on a bench smoking a cigarette waiting for the library to open. exculpatory, adjective: Adapted or intended to clear from blame or a charge of guilt; apologetic, vindicatory. atonement, noun: The condition of being at one with others; unity of feeling, harmony, concord, agreement. Restoration of friendly relations between persons who have been at variance; reconciliation. Propitiation (favourable, gracious, kind) of an offended or injured person, by reparation of wrong or injury; amends, satisfaction, expiation (penance). A simpleminded mistake: Buber (I thought) is about categories - Thou/You/It - and it's so, in part, but he is also about process and arriving (possibly) at an authentic 'we'. Nós. dialogue, noun: a conversation between two or more persons; a colloquy (speaking together). dialectic, noun: the investigation of truth by discussion.         This meaning is muddied, the word having been idologically hijacked by the Socialists for         a specialized meaning which you can look up for yourself. dialogic, adjective: pertaining to, or of the nature of dialogue; sharing in dialogue.

Love/hate relationships, maybe this includes all of them, but surely not simultaneously (simply to satisfy mere mechanical feasibility). Pierre Reverdy may be right - «Il n'y a pas d'amour, il n'y a que des preuves d'amour.» One obvious possible proof is choice, which undoes in a way some of the cynical part. Probably no one will mention that the Brasilian cartoons are not translated this week. Oh well.

He that we last as Thurn and Taxis knew         Now recks no lord but the stiletto's Thorn,         And Tacit lies the gold once-knotted horn.         No hallowed skein of stars can ward, I trow,         Who's once been set his tryst with Trystero. Sturm und Drang then is it? A Fugue? Theory & Praxis (not knowing too many -axis words)? Twisted sadness? Chagrin? What is our Thomas on about? tacit: Not openly expressed or stated, but implied; understood, inferred. Latin tacere to be silent.

Job's wife says to 'im, "Dost thou still retain thine integrity? Curse God, and die." An odd question and a strange non sequitur kind of rhetorical echo. I'm not telling you any of this because I expect you to (necessarily) do anything but simply because I want you to know it, or (at least) have the opportunity of knowing it, the possibility, perhaps later on in the future sometime. Or not.

A-and, I am putting it into this blog so I can remember it too. There are kinds, modes, of thinking. Darwin in the 1850s, and ... Darcy Wentworth Thompson - 'On Growth and Form' (1917) - scientists. In statistics you trim off the highs and lows, discard the outliers; but in science it may be the very outliers that first show up some crack in the current theory and lead to a superior integration (seems to me). Please Sir, could I have a little yin with that yang? Will it be correctitude & ideology or (essentially) light-hearted observations on consistency designed to enlighten?

Filling time downloading TV programs and watching them; BBC, ITV, British shows mostly, mysteries, dramas, police stuff; there seems to be a band of gypsies who go about making them and the same actors appear frequently. The stories are mostly (99%) dreck, unreal mindless crap-o-la, manipulative shit, improbable, impossible, untrue, and the mind wanders. I forget what I've seen and watch the same series over again several times. Actresses with wide-set eyes, and I wonder how much of whatever is in mind or personality or intelligence or spirit, what you will, is determined by a (presumably) greater bifocal effect? Humming Big Bopper's 'Chantilly Lace' ... "Ain't nothin' in the world like a big-eye'd girl ..." The colours run from one thought to another, into them all, channels of memory remembered (and likely many more unconscious but still active in whatever structures store them). Up pops Pynchon's use of 'palimpsest' and another dozen layers pile on - startin' t'look like a jamboree! I read somewhere - one of the psychologists who designs clearly measurable experiments - that the change in size of the pupils in person A's eyes is perceptible by person B who then registers person A's level of interest and possible intentions. Amazing!   Not me. So much anodyne TV I can hardly recognize entire faces anymore nevermind details.

I pester my NDP Member of Parliament, Matthew Kellway, in public meetings and with repeated emails, to have him explain the detailed mechanics of fossil fuel subsidies. He is the NDP critic for environmental issues and might be expected to know. He never answers, except once, in person face-to-face, when he promises to. Now a report comes out, described in The Guardian, and available for download from Overseas Development Institute (ODI). Many questions are answered. One that isn't: What about government pension plan investments? (And unions for that matter?) I put it about but no one responds so I leave it here not to be forgotten. Suburbs as proxy (poxy) frontier. Gaudi's towers, and Shukhov's, are (certainly) not design-committee exercises. They lack the appalling language of correctitude & appeasement. They are also both incomplete - and don't remind me of dildos or french ticklers either. I am sure that none of these observations are connected.

The concrete column on the right there is for show not blow - there is a gap between it and the beam it appears to support - the structural engineer had integrity.   :-) Back-turnings and cold shoulders too numerous to count. Three 'Antichrist's. (At least) two horrible 'Waddya-still-doin'-here?'s. 'Asshole!' from the kids (specific sins not specified). Silent shunning from all the other kin. And one 'shitholder'. Doesn't guess. Hasta be told again and again. Nine inch nails an' the penny still don't drop. In the event, 'shitholder' is coupled with a flying solid-oak dining-room table (in the days when 'solid-oak' means something). Some people think he holds this against her. Not so. Such strong authentic originality fills him with amazed admiration, love. Put that way they (naturally) assume it's ... sarcasm, some irony some, twist or other. When all it is is true.

What are the facts? Who knows? And the whole computer thing is a red herring too, Vince was right. (God bless 'im - though neither of us would ever say such a thing.) A shitholder to be sure (me not Vince). Viejo verde ('green old man'). Gordo feio e fedorento. Com hábitos ruins, viciado, desesperado, infeliz, só. "To cease upon the midnight with no pain," says Keats ("the blushful Hippocrene" having already been touched upon above). A young man admitting he will live because the muse stops singing? Is that it? A curious inversion. I wish I'd saved enough for a hidey-hole in Brasil or Costa Rica. Disappear up my own arsehole like a dying anemone or coral polyp. I didn't, and I (exactly) do not know now what to do next.

  
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Crossing the Rubicon ... or anti-crossing as may be.

Full moon yesterday. Which one is that? ... Hunter's Moon was it?

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Flood Bay Street! Toxic Zombies at Bay & King Streets, Toronto Noon on Friday October 31, Halloween.

The Toronto mayoral election is not over until the 27th. Please recognize that: Olivia Chow & John Tory Are Two Cheeks On The Same Horse's Ass! (a few posts below). (And now back to a stream-of-consciousness already in progress ... or something.) The Tourette's has moderated to "Oh, Come On!" or just "Fuck You!" or "Fuck This!   "Nary a tinge remaining of what was (understandably but incorrectly) considered by some to be misogyny - back years ago when it was sometimes "Cunt!" & "Fuckin' Bitch!". And I'm not strapping on explosives and heading for a crowded Second Cup or Starbucks either; just sitting here on a chair in this backwater of a moribund public library (completely under the sway of a more-or-less illiterate labour union); having had a smoke on the bench - dedicated to two women I know only by name: Mary Nearing & Dorothy Peacock - behind the (moribund public) library in the moribund public park (ditto 'under the sway'); in this quiet corner of the Internet, which is itself a minor current, minor symptom, of a moribund civilization; just here, like Vonnegut's Bokonon giving the finger atop his Pisgah as he finally succumbs to Ice-9; sayin' quietly, softly, but defiant-like: Fuck You In Your Glass Eye!             (Thanks again to Daphne.)   I've seen the future brother, it is murder: "This river I step in is not the river I stand in," says Eldon Garnet in 1996. "This park I walk in is not the park I step on," sez I. I began burning this candle in 2009 in the weeks before Copenhagen; and it got to be a habit. Careful & constant trimming can lead to a tiny blue flame - so that a single candle (the cheap ones from the Dollar Store) lasts for days, a week. A corollary is that the flame is so small it sometimes gets missed at bed time. Uh oh! Burn the whole fricken' place down! Not yet anyway. Also in 2009 a volunteer yam began to sprout on my kitchen counter. I planted it in a window pot. Turned out to be a vine and five years later it is still going back and forth across the window. I wonder if it is running out of steam (like its gardener) because lately it has started sprouting tiny pairs of leaves here and there. Unusual somehow. Not quite sure exactly why? Many of my heroes are women, nothin' special there, and I have been cultivating my anima (if not my inner-child, who requires no cultivation, like a weed). The last few childish & defiant acts were to order Naomi Oreskes' book 'The Collapse of Western Civilization: A view from the future', and Naomi Klein's 'This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate', knowing they'll never be paid for. (It is now chopped up and filed in the bin. We won't be havin' no more of that kind'a foolish nonsense eh?   :-) Must be instant Karma though, because both of 'em are disappointing. 'The Collapse of Western Civilization' is incomplete, unfinished; as it stands no more than a bit of sarcastic sophomoric rhetoric - monovalent yet! It might have been, should have been, could have been something more. I'll say this: she keeps me guessing ... I am surprised when Wham!, it's over without ending. We find ourselves standing in the desert before the statue of Ozymandias. There's half an arch stretching up to somewhere above his topknot where it just ... stops. And suddenly the whole picture turns into a Road Runner cartoon: everything creaks and shatters, the arch falls over with a thump, and Porky Pig is sayin' "Th-th-th-that's all folks!." All she (and Erik of course) had to do to see the defecit was re-read it a few times. Maybe she did and it was too much to think about fixing. A few excerpts and opinions around Naomi Klein's 'This Changes Everything':     12th: Naomi Klein in the Toronto Globe;     13th: Excerpt in The Guardian;     13th: Suzanne Goldenberg in The Guardian; Culminating in one that 'resonates' ominously if you read it carefully by Suzanne Goldenberg on the 14th; And a Guardian editorial: 14th: September 14; and a week later, an actual 'review' by Jenny Turner. Ms. Klein gets so much of it right; but there are clues. Her obsessive footnoting f'rinstance - if she had a scientific degree she might have the confidence to simply state the conclusions she journalistically reports, which would have so much more force. The disappointment comes in her refusal to accept the conclusions she arrives in front of. Unlike Pynchon's hero (in 'Vineland') who leaps annually through a picture window to gain his pension, she charges straight at it ... and then ... chokes! The video of her recent panel discussion in NYC bears a close look. Beside her sits Chris Hedges who - more politely and graciously than I expected having read his articles before I saw the video - simply takes her material where it is going: Resistance will mean jail time and direct confrontation. Resistance will mean physically disrupting the corporate machinery. Resistance will mean severing ourselves from the dominant culture to build small, self-sustaining communities. This resistance will be effective only when we refuse to do what we are told, when we turn from a liberal agenda of reform to embrace a radical agenda of revolt. That might seem to turn this post into sedition. Whatever. "Curiouser and curiouser," says Alice (one of my animas) on discovering that some Russian has set up a mirror copy of this blog with a .ru suffix. What's that about I wonder? The password is not compromised as far as I can see. Hmmmm...? I need to make a note of this dream so I don't forget it. Don't worry yourself. You're not going to forget.   The Barn Ramp: In a potted eulogy the preacher calls my mother a feminist; not knowing her, never having met her; she must have the notion from my sisters. Mom was never a thinker nor her daughters neither so I doubt feminism - a wonderful vitality yes, ideology no. I challenge her on the spot and since it's my mother's funeral she goes away (of course without admitting any wrongdoing, why would she?). When I get to be 6, 7, 8 years old, mom begins to take an active role in CGIT summer camps and I am taken along. There might be one other boy there, the unfortunate son of another counsellor but it's hit or miss if we can be friends. One evening the girls in the neighbouring tent are babysitting and get curious (as they would). It isn't like they're going to hurt me, they just want to see a penis up close (and sure enough, I also - already - want to see a one'a theirs). Our negotiations are interrupted by my mother's return. "What are you DOING?!" There is a river near one of the camps with slippery clay banks. I'm expressly forbidden to go there but go anyway - to get the clay and make things of it. This gets kiboshed when I begin to present bowls and ask how to fire them (having discovered that simply putting them at the edge of a campfire turns them to dust). On the path that leads beside the field to the river are the remains of a hay barn - just the foundation slab and a large (,huge, almost perfectly) triangular ramp that the horses dragged the waggons up into the hay maw (the OED will give no clue on this word :-). It is made of mortared stone and I determine that beneath it is a cell in which young girls are imprisoned. My job becomes to liberate them. I steal a claw hammer from a tool shed and beat away at the ramp over several days. Which is where she finds me - having been told that I've been seen going back to the river. Which river I wonder? Reminds me of a tiny story I wrote a few years ago: Sex. Oh yeah, sure ... I can see the mediocre minds drifting back to 'misogynist' like fricken' gravity - moths to a flickering flame of correctitude. And oh! ... He's feeling sorry for himself the wanker! Not so either gentle reader. No. Had I been a Jew, then, I might have been one of the Hasids who went, dancing and singing or holding a loved one's hand, might have been, or a stranger's hand - for no good reason. On the other side of this Rubicon is no fixed address, no computer to hide in among films & TV programs, a complete unknown (with no direction home). Oh fuck! Oh fuck!   No dentist?! No chocolate chip cookies?! No endless coffee?! ... «Yo no tengo dónde estar.»   (Violeta Parra, 'El Gavilán', date?)   Goodbye cruel world!                                                                                   Didn't hear I guess ...

 
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