Feel like my head has developed its own internal syncopation.
Had a joyful time drinking myself into a stupor with Lettuce and Melons last night. It's an unusual experience going out on the piss with scarygirls (Melons' phrase) - they're both tall, skinny, foxy, trendy and wearing very scary stillettos.
Pub landlord's greeting: "Hey. Are you going to start a fight this week, ladies?" See - scary!
Usually at the pub, I'm hanging out with a load of blokes, or it's a gay bar; this sort of attention is a new thing.
Mid-way through Lettuce's explanation of her tinyurl project (see how many swear words you can get out of an active link - yayy! Geektalk), some young trendy guys started hitting on us. This is so far out of my experience I was momentarily gobsmacked.
Stumbling around after girls, trying to engage them in sad convos about sculpture, check. Edging along the seat while someone you previously felt quite comfortable drinking with gets overemotional and starts drooling, check. The pub weirdo decides to tail you about the place in order to waffle about his stamp collection, check. Random blokes grabbing your arse from behind and making conversation later, check.
Actual real goodlooking blokes wandering up out of the blue and desperately trying to make chatter out of 'sorry to interrupt. What do you do?' - new thing.
Melons and Lettuce iced them out. I think we were meant to giggle or something. Interact.
No, a ten minute frosty glare period ensued, while blokes mumbled eight apologies and sank ever deeper in to their fancy european girlie beers.
Melons: "well really, why try it with us, we were patently the scariest women in the pub."
Okay, so I'm going to try wearing stilettos in Barking now.

txt msg conversation

Now Playing: hissing pipe noise

Orange: "what time r u getting 2 pub? were waiting"

Virgin: "sorry not coming. decided 2 stay in and blog"

Orange: "that's all right. hope u r okay? take care"

Virgin: "not really - am walking 2 pub now"

Virgin: "u believed me! -- u daft twat"

Orange: "cunt"

That's the fastest, most tersely phrased txt msg exchange I've had in years.

What Milkshake are You?

Three facts:
The Soham Murder trials have begun, and it's now offically okay for the British press to fetishise every last possible detail of the murder of children. Charles Causley is dead. Born on the 1117th day of WW1, and now dead. I'll have to look out Charlotte Dymond again.
I can't remember the third fact, which only goes to show you shouldn't eat one potato over a two day period then go out drinking without assuming you'll be blotto.

On my three hour journey back from the suburban hellhole that is Barking, I spotted some fruit smoothies on sale at Blackfriar's station.
"Honey and Vanilla Bean Thickies."

Mental chime time. Thought about |genericjob|. Thought about |genericwankycolleagues|.

Honey and Soured Tart Thickies.

Apology accepted, November

Now Playing: the last few explosions rocking the city

[Smitten wrote it so well that I had to rip it off]

for making the alarm go off ten minutes before I have to leave, no matter what time I set it for;

for waking me up to four piles of fresh acrid cat vomit this morning;

for breaking the hot water boiler twenty four long stinky hours before my gynaecologist had to don a gas mask;

for distracting me from my true purpose (coffee consumption) just long enough to enable |genericwankycolleagues| to drink all the four pints I brewed. Twice;

for closing down my local garage, run by the only other man I ever completely trusted; for sending me all the way to Barking at six in the morning to find a replacement mechanic who comes with recommendations;

for encouraging my number phobia by making it impossible to buy a wrist watch that has numbers on it, when you know I still can't tell the time in under a minute;

for positioning that seagull to shit on the car windscreen today;

for making my one early night this week coincide with Guy Fawkes, so I could catch up on my slumber in the heavy artillery fire of a warzone;

I forgive you November, for that fucking two weeks of flu and fever, for the tears and the drama, for the cold, the dark, and the stink of gunpowder, But only because you brought me these leaves.

List

Now Playing: blinding explosions, from all directions

Inspired by something I once wrongly assumed about Looby, I keep a paper blogpad, and write my daily over-personal tripe while mouldering in a traffic jam somewhere on the Canterbury road. It stops me from spending every minute of the evening on the peecee, and means I get a chance to read other blogs when I'm online (thusly spending every minute of the evening on the peecee).

I was sat in a cafe eating old potato tonight, listening to the deafening roar of a thousand trillion Guy Fawkes celebrations; bored of the trash that passes for news in the local paper, I flicked through the blogpad, wondering if those congealed baked beans could be worked up into something half as good as what Smitten or Eurotrash have been churning out lately. Turning the page, I found this mysterious looking list:

cleaning
lesbian dinner party
cat pictures
pisscards
pictures

Is it a To Do List? An Action Plan? Christmas Wish List? My Unique Selling Points? A forgotten Personals ad? Perhaps a truncated curriculum vitae?

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Five Bad Habits

Now Playing: Crashing artillery fire from eight different directions.

1. Being rude to people.

2. Picking the black London snot from my nose at 7 am traffic lights. But I pride myself that I'm one flick above the guy in the white Corsa who picked and munched last week.

3. Forgetting that being rude is bad enough, but being articulate and rude is often considered deeply personal.

4. Reheating old coffee in the microwave.

5. Resenting ever having to be reasonable. It was my bloody chocolate muffin, don't you forget it. If I can't eat it, no-one will.

Wake Up to Yourself

Now Playing: Foo Fighters, 'Avalon'

Another confessional diary piece... it's personal. Deeply.

I felt really shit, lonely and unwanted when I went to bed last night.
I'd failed for the third time in a row to get to see Toulouse before he returns to France. I was jealous of how much support he'd given ex-DH and not a little paranoid that he really preferred not to see me. By phone, I felt he'd been very judgemental and unfair about my treatment of ex-DH. Why can't I be civilised about it. Why make such a scene. He'd implied the party on Friday had been an excruciating experience for all present because I was creating such an atmosphere. I gave up on the conversation and cried myself to sleep, because :
whinge1. it's not true about the party;
whinge2. it's unfair that all ex-DH's friends decide I'm the nasty villain of the piece, and therefore unclubbable;
whinge3. if she hadn't been the architect of the icy atmosphere at the party, she wouldn't have apologised for it to me;
whinge4. true to form, three hours sleep a night means that negative comments make paranoia kick in.

If Toulouse is reading, I hope he doesn't stop just there, because thankfully, this morning I woke up to myself a little. Toulouse has been feeling pretty ill, and he's stuck himself slap in the middle of a bad situation, with not much of a way out (as has Duch, incidentally). He must be sick to death of trying to defend me to ex-DH, and, defend ex-DH to me. Poor bloke. It's a big, messy, break-up. Both of us are going to do things that are indefensible, and that, too, is part of the process. Don't get caught in the crossfire, Toulouse.
So, I talked obliquely to him today, deliberately trying to focus on chatting about religion, culture, France, films. He sounded so relieved. And so, in a way, was I. (Of course, then poor Duch got it in the neck with a three hour phone call, but hey, real progress is always slowly made.)

Nothing's the worst it can possibly be, not till you're dead and dusted. I'm not going to pretend I've not been feeling miserable and down - but you know what? Eventually it's going to hurt less. So it's repetitive? That's because the emotions are powerful, and they're all too real. It seems uncivilised? No, uncivilised is hiding what you feel from your best friends, pretending you care about them without allowing them to care about you. Remembering the good bits should hurt, perhaps.
It's not the hurt that I want to forget - it's the repetition, the going over and over things in your head, the panic. Just hurting is part of a spectrum. It's the same spectrum that lets us feel that kind of all-encompassing absorption in another person that makes you look at them for days and not want to turn away. That makes you lose your job rather than climb out of their bed, because money doesn't matter. That full investment in being in another human's personal space, that makes even sharing beans on toast or their closeness on a riverside bench a rich experience. That total full body ache when you're near them, because you so want them to look at you. The shivering thrill you get when they might touch your arm. The way you can give them your whole attention, unblinking, unwavering. That absorption in another that allows you to 'know' when they lift one finger to touch you at five in the morning, because you were lying awake all night just to experience their presence, their nearness, their smell. Some people never feel this kind of love. The need for someone that makes you press for full body contact, as long as possible, when they say goodbye. The knowledge that they're drinking in every detail about you. The full physical intensity of being enthralled by someone - not bored, not marking time, not merely being sociable, or amused - but fully loving someone - it's amazing. You're fool's gold lucky if you get that once, I think. I've loved six people now - fully, properly, generously enjoyed their presence. I've felt them consume my attention, and draw me away from the world.

It's amazing, and it comes from the same store of emotion as the hurt. From now on, if I cry, I'm not pitying myself - I'm experiencing life as it's meant to be lived. Not alone, through people. With the lows that prove the highs. The hurt is precious - I don't want to give it up speedily. It reminds me of my huge capacity for loving other people. It's not an end, it's a reminder. Life goes on.

Armed with this new positivity, I rang the ex-DH and told her it's high time she got her own place, instead of staying with Duch, that her inability to grasp the full range of her choices was a choice in itself, that all her high drama is unreal, and it's time for her to move on.
No doubt that hurt her horribly - she slammed the phone down. Again I'm the villain. But I loved her, and someone had to say it.

Divorce Me 6

Deep in the wildest undergrowth of yesterday's comments , Darren's questions prompted some thoughts that I hadn't formed into words so far:
"Were you this deeply unhappy when you and DH were together?"
"There were too many prescriptions on my life. I need more freedom than I had. I'm not being facile, I was biding by more rules and regs than a teenager usually has. There wasn't enough communication. When you don't communicate, it's not the case that you don't communicate, you simply impute more wildly wrong motives to the other person's behaviour. Over time, this can lead to some wild, weird-wrong apprehensions about the other person. And there were too many old arguments to be raked up that I and she were never going to be able to get over. Until those grudges are firmly in the past, we'd never move forward. Both of us need to grow up a little before it would actually work, rather than pootle along making the same mistakes.
You're right, I love her, she loves me. But we're both just wasting time if we're making each other miserable. She deserves better. I certainly deserve better. I intend to get 'better'. Seriously I do. Whether that involves difficulties, being alone, or financial problems - I only get one shot at this. I'm not spending my time being underestimated, fucking about as if I'm a bit-actor in a third rate soap opera, or being ignored. It's not good enough for me".

Having run like a weasel away from the flat when ex-DH returned to pick up some stuff / lie face down on things, I wondered if some things out of place were merely my paranoia when I got back.
Item: vase full of flowers thrown against wall;
Item: my new camera lens broken open;
Item: the largest kitchen knife out on the shelf.

Am I paranoid? Am I?

extending rubber family

My cousin, Troy, lives one street away from me. I don't know what number house she lives at, because I've purposely forgotten, and she doesn't know which house I live in because I've banned anyone from telling her.
It's not that I don't like Troy - far from it, she's the most interesting, entertaining member of a huge extended family. It's just that I don't seem to 'do' family very well.

I remember the last time I bumped into Troy at the local market, while ex-DH's super-quiet tiny sister Mouse was visiting. We agreed to meet up that night to go clubbing in (at the time) hyper-trendy Shoreditch.
Which, not ever having been one to really socialise with the hundreds of relations who also live and work in London (gerroff! It's my city ... I was here first ... et cetera), I regarded as a pretty pro-family, modern thing to do.
Having steeled Mouse with the information that Troy was a little bonkers, that (until I'd taken up the mantle by outing myself at a deeply catholic family wedding as a screaming bender), she'd been the twenty time winner of Black Sheep of the Year.
Given that all my friends are gobby, loud and opinionated (sorry guys, but you are. *grin*), this was probably no great shock to Mouse. However, I was a little paranoid that she might perhaps report back to exmotherinlaw that not only was I scary, the rest of my family were both too loud and squint.
This was before Troy moved into the next street from here. So we trollied over to Troy's slightly-trendier-place-than-now, and rang the bell. (While watching the local six year old vandals run screaming through a disused factory wielding burning brands - see what I mean about living in gunpowder-related lawlessness?) Mouse was already sinking well below her collar with trepidation, and ex-DH was desperately trying to gee her up that it was a mere five minutes of house party, that soon we'd move on.

Troy, who, like me, is taaaaaaallllllllllllllllllllllll, threw open the door, screaming a greeting. She was in five inch platform shoes with stack heels, and a tiny tiny tiny rubber nurse's uniform.
Judging by the daisy-stalk neck and pinprick pupils, she was coked out of her skull.
"It's mah cuzzzzen!" she shrieked in a Mancunian accent, flung open the door and stomped inside without further ceremony.
"Guyys! Guyyyys! This is mah cuzzzzen! Where's the vodka - lez drink vodka! Eeeeeeeeee!!!!"
Deep intake of breath, and I followed her inside. This is the fucking thing about family. There's nothing you can do. Certifiable or not, they don't go away.
Fifteen minutes passed: during which cocktails of cocaine, prozac and one pint of vodka were consumed, and we seriously considered swimming in the minging, stinking February canal out back, before I realised that the front door was still wide open, and neither Mouse nor ex-DH had come in.

They were sat in the dark on the wall outside, where ex-DH was trying to talk Mouse down out of a full-on panic attack. A panic attack brought on merely by the sight of my cousin towering in the doorway. Teeth had been clenched, nails had dug into breezeblock, and the words "I can't go in there" had been hissed like venom. This is the fucking thing about family. There's nothing you can do.

Needless to say, we all went clubbing, Troy offered to pay the ancient taxi driver with services of an - ahem - non-monetary nature, and the only person who actually scored either man or beast was Mouse.

I have sixteen living aunts / uncles / godparents, not including their relatives. That adds up to twenty cousins, and they mostly haven't even bred yet. Half the family still seem to live in or around the same valley, oop north, still feuding about the same things as when I was a kid.
Tomorrow, my parents are coming up to visit. Please god don't let them pop into Troy's flat to say hello on the way ....

Which to blog? Good, or bad?

Bad points of the day:

Was out till three this morning driving people home to various corners of London. Had to ask them to hang around while I put petrol in the car, 'cos I knew I'd be too scared to do that at 3am in an East London garage forecourt on my own. Never good to arrive home stone sober in the small hours, thinking about that sort, that 'will anyone even notice when I'm murdered' variety, that flavour of being on my own.
Crying (sigh. Sorry. I know, it's pathetic) at the Hallowe'en party because ex-DH was there, but she'd decided to pretend she couldn't see me in the same room as her.
But only a little bit.
At four in the morning, not content with having watched Ringu at home alone the day before (even despite the strange nightly thumping sounds in the attic), I watched Ringu 2. Alone. Through the creepy evilhourofyourdoom attic banging. Now I feel all macho and tough, but I can't look at a VCR without kissing a rabbit's foot and throwing salt over my shoulder.
Duch came round today and went a bit odd at me. It was when I showed her the pics of last night's party. Apparently, taking her photo and showing it to her has scarred her forever. I should never have done such a thing (actually, I didn't, Ulp did - but: meh) and it's all because of me that she'll need plastic surgery now. Duch was super uber hyper lovely to be around yesterday, but today was too damn highly strung.
She brought here with her the ex-DH, who came to pick up more clothes (the house is still crammed full of her things), and to hug up the peskycats. I'd wanted to be out when she got here - and to be honest, I think after last night she'd wanted me to be out as well. It's now twenty-one days since we split up and seeing an ex three times in one week is just sillypainfulfoolishness.
I ran into the shower as soon as she got here. When I came out, ex-DH was lying face down. On the bed. Not good.
That's as much past as the present can stand. I left the house, pronto.
My car was vandalised again. Yeah, the car whose locks were drilled last week by the friendly local tea-leaf. The three month old car I bought to replace the one that (a combination of my crashing it and) thieves totalled in June. They'd used a screwdriver to try to jemmy the rear window off.
This is a P-reg, wagon-sized, diesel-fuel, old, staid, pikey-car. The only thing attractive about it is that it's coloured red. Can I just quietly mutter an "ack"?

Good points of the day (read this one first):

Hallowe'en. There's no bloody point to it! Yayy....

The East End genetically criminal obsession with gunpowder means that from Diwali to Christmas, the sky hereabouts is alive with explosions every night, and at weekends through most of the day, too.
My cats are smaller, sweeter, cuddlier and softer than Berlioz's stinky puppy.
I haven't met anyone English who can spell 'sarsparilla' yet. Purely for the purpose of this declaration, Tristan is now Spanish, and doesn't count.
Now I know that my car is hard to break into. Cool!
Instead of me hanging out with the ex-DH and crying, or skulking about with our joint friends tonight (and secretly crying), Dave let me hide at his house and eat roquefort on toast / drink Earl Grey / read uber calming lists of Nineties record collections for most of the evening, which was immensely more cheering. And involved zero amounts of crying.
I've realised that if you gather enough people in their early thirties together in one room, between you you can piece together the entire musical history of New Kids on the Block.
My word, but the Dartford crossing is pretty at night.

1.61 Kilometre End Does Gunpowder-Related Lawlessness Well, Unsurprisingly

Great fireworks, good company down the pub after, swapping shrapnel tales and corny digi-pics with Dave and his pals, bizarre journey with Duch through three counties to get to party. Nice puppy at party, shame it kept doing so many cabbage farts. Good to see people I've known for years and years. And they forgave me for forgetting the 1am appointment with their whiskey bottle on Thursday. Realised Berlioz looks funny as hell in glowing pumpkin deely-boppers, his puppy has him trained well, that Melons still has great legs after all these years, that Toulouse doesn't like it when you shout 'hairy arse' at him, Ulp can sing Wham's back catalogue like an angel, and when Ballerino brags about the worth of his drunken directions-giving, it's a fool who will actually try to follow those instructions.
Slightly spoilded by presence of ex-DH in 'I'm ignoring you' mode, which made it a little annoying / upsetting / maudlin by turns. So I'll learn from that - new focus for next week: shit happens, you learn from it. Lesson 1: when someone gives you a thirty mile lift home, it's rude to pretend to be asleep just because you don't know what to say. Blimey, though, I already knew that.

Fizzz! Bang! Ka-pow! Crackle! Whizzzzzz! Wheee!

No time to blog!
I'm off out to a Mexican firework display.

Then a Hallowe'en party.

WoooooOOOOooooOOOOOoooOOOOOoooooooh.

Crush

Mood:  amorous
Now Playing: An episode of 'Murder, She Wrote' in which a dog is found to be the serial killer.

I was chatting to Martin yesterday about people on whom I have a crush.
Now, to stop this becoming silly, there have to be ground rules. In this post, here, today, now, a crush is someone you've entertained involuntary sexual fantasies about for at least two years on the trot.
So, no, Nick from Kajagoogoo doesn't cut it. Nor Princess Di, despite the fact that I was a founder of the university Diana For Queen society (thank god in the days before web pages), and imperiously refused interviews to a Swedish teev channel after her death (like, shyah, Swedish teev hounded her to her grave). But my fantasies about Ze Stoopid Sloane, although ribald, were not involuntary, so they don't count.

Of course, there are the obligatory lesbian baby-dyke crushes, like Nicola Cowper, Kate Hardie or Charlotte Gainsbourg. But dykes always end up blogging endlessly about women of dubious sexuality on childrens' teev, and frankly, it becomes tedious.
(At this stage, I'm not willing to enter revelatory mode regarding sexual fantasies about trees and rubber tires.)
No, I'm more fascinated by the male crushes -- and my other crushes are all seriously ancient ugly old men. Top of the list - Donald Sutherland. Close second at fifteen years crush status - Christopher Walken. Bringing up the rear (ooer, missus), Arnold Schwarzenegger, oooh how embarrassing, a relative newcomer at just five years of crush.
How come no-one fantasises about old women like they do old men? I mean, you wouldn't kick Helen Mirren out, but by and large, male mingers gain much greater sexual status as they get older. I've seen blokes who would definitely rate a three out of ten in their teens and twenties attract the attention more merited by a nine in their late thirties, purely by virtue of being either single or up for it. How come someone like "Steve" Norris can even beg a shag?

You do not do, you do not do / Anymore / Black Shoe

Mood:  hug me
.... in which I have lived like a foot / for thirty years, poor and white.
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

et cetera. Short, terrible warning: If you have recently split up with someone, DO NOT, repeat,

DO NOT

start reading poetry.

And if you do, DO NOT, repeat,

DO NOT

spend the day reading Petrarchan sonnets.

translated from Sonnet 134:
Peace I do not find, and I have no wish to make war; and I fear and hope, and burn and am of ice; and I fly above the heavens and lie on the ground; and I grasp nothing and embrace all the world.

One holds me in a prison which neither opens nor locks, neither keeps me for his own nor unties the bonds; and Love does not kill and does not unchain me, he neither wishes me alive nor frees me from the tangle.

I see without eyes and I have no tongue, and yet I cry out; and I wish to perish and I ask for help; and I hate myself and love another.

I feed on pain, weeping I laugh; equally displeasing to me are death and life. In this state am I, Lady, on account of you.

Ack! Shoot me now.

fanwank

Now Playing: Radiohead (spit): Everything in it's Right Place. Again and again, like some retarded obsessive moron. So what else is new?

While my blogroll sidebar is out of order, I have to point out a few blogs I've spotted in the previous few days that are shockingly well written. None of them are in the sidebar blogroll, because I can't get into it. If I just started bugging you on your site, and you're not in here, then it's because you're already in the invisible broken sidebar. You're just going to have to trust me on that.

This one is amazingly well written. Too well. I suspect a hoax, almost.

Also, I've lately been amazed at how good certain sites have been doing - here, here and here. But I think everybody knows about them anyway.

And I got into an argument with the owner of this site, who is pompous and pretentious in a heated email exchange, but can actually spell, which it turns out I can't. I promised him public obeisance (which he confused with pubic obeisance), so here it is, Sean: sorry. My weblog is spelt wrong. Unless you're a Northerner.

Plus, please read this post by yidaho. It's in the Truth Laid Bear newblog showcase, and if you join up to their ecosystem (which ranks blogs by connectivity and sitemeter traffic, yadda yadda) (I love them, because today they promoted me from Crunchy Crustacean to Slimy Mollusc, just when I feared becoming a Lowly Insect) (it's the Night Nurse, I tells ya, it does things to my brain...), and link to her on your front page, then she wins...erm... I dunno what. Some slippers?
I told you today's post would be fanwanky.
In fact, after my coffee, wanking may be the next topic, to match yesterday's effluvia. Quake, ye mortals!

< # Girls Blog UK ? > Powered by RingSurf! < # Gay Diary ? > < L DykeWrite3 # > < # Blogging Brits ? > < # BloggingBitches ? > << # Gay Brits ? >> Read THIS blog:

This is my blogchalk: United Kingdom, London, East London, Bow, English, German, Vanessa, Female, 31-35, Literature / Movies, Food / Eating / Drinking. Rate Me on BlogHop.com! help?

powered by bravenet.com i say, "FUCK!"

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Updated: Sunday, 2 November 2003 2:19 PM GMT
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You Might Not Want to Read This...

Mood:  caffeinated
Now Playing:

I'm full of snot. Literally a wall of moist green soft-centre tissues has formed around me.

It got me to thinking about effluvia (doesn't take much, admittedly), particularly after last night when the gorgeous Tess messaged me from Belfast to say that all the English are obsessed with shit.

And why not?

I'd have to go a long way to beat the glorious Niki's poo-obsessed posts of late, and she's from Chicago, not ye Olde Browne Country. Mind you, she's not yet gone this far. That curry does look a little fecal, does it not?

Anyway, effluvia. I have weird veins -- they pop sometimes. If you pressed my arm too hard, it would become a hand shaped bruise. (At 16, I had a fight with a boyfriend. Not a serious proper fight, we were bored and seeing how much more power you could put in a punch if you pulled back your fist into a 'claw' shape, before throwing from the shoulder. The answer was: gains considerable impact. I knocked out one of his teeth, and had to wear long sleeve sweaters / lie that I'd been in a car accident for a month.)
I blame the pasty-skin Celtic heritage (take that, Belfast!), but I bruise so easy that I sometimes don't need the original impact at all. I just feel a weird ache in a wrist or a finger for an hour or so, then ... pop ... large swollen black digits. The first time it happened, I rushed to an A & E.
Exhaustedhousedoctor: "You have a bruise, madam."
Me: [shrieking] "But it's filled with black blood and swollen to eight times the size! My artery just exploded!"
Exhaustedhousedoctor: [sighs] "That's what a bruise is."

Anyway, while working through uni in a |malecentredindustry| McJob, near Arsenal (lasting effects: a fondness for shouting "Up the Arse" at your father), I used to exploit the exploding vein syndrome in order to alleviate the boredom of dealing with tipsy bloke customers who permanently addressed my knockers, and used to while away their own boredom by seeing how red a single comment could make my cheeks go.
Only, because I worked Saturdays, and because I was twenty-one, and trying to be 'wild', I used to generally turn up for work in the most awful |morningafterthenightbefore| sort of state. One time I wandered in to McJob twelve hours after taking my second ever tab of E (ee, those were the days), gave away #120 to strangers from Perth, and had to wear a miniskirt for the next three weeks to save myself from unemployment.
The week of the exploding arse was the worst, though.

I was fortunate, I knew, to be working one of the joints with a bog, or the whole sorry tale could have rendered this blog the victim of a million scat searches.
Slow morning, only one near dead pensioner overcome with the jitters, usual regs still all in the pub next door, working themselves up to their weekly *makevanessablush* challenge.
Stomach rumblings. Nice quiet moment to excuse myself to the loo by the manager's desk. Once inside, it's a windowless fan-assisted closet. One of those situations where it's you, the Sixties spit-flush slimline bog, a ten year old crusty loo brush and the fag end of an Asda bogroll. Okay, I could tell that I was packing solids, so perhaps if I folded the eight squares then separated them carefully into tiny, pleated squares, I could make it.
I don't know what I'd taken the night before, but it was not going to agree with the tiny pleated squares theory.
Cue anal explosion. Didn't even make it to the bowl in time -- it all happened while hovering. Chris Ofili would have been proud of what I plastered on those walls.
I won't go into too much detail about the clean-up, except to say that all eight squares were prioritised for my arse, thankyou, sod the walls.
I was in that stinky airless room for ninety minutes, co-workers hammering on the door. It took many many flushes, and it was me, my bundled up knickers (the only disposible item of clothing I could bear to use as a washcloth) and the bog brush scrubbing the walls in horror for almost every one of those minutes.
Finally, I flushed the knickers, adjusted my clothing and tried to calm the raging beleisha beacon that was my face. I opened the door to face the horrified boss sat at his desk, 30 centimetres away. Behind me, the walls of the lav were clearly soaking wet.
"What? I'm fine. But do you mind if I go home now?"

A week later, I turned up after an entire week on amphetamines, speeding my tits off, latest shag in tow, to resign.
Horrifiedboss: "You're not normal. It's not normal to wear see-through tops to work, go bright red all the time and have exploding veins. You wanna see a doctor."
I've always had half a crush on him for not including in that exit line any reference to anal explosions.

Footnotes:
1. He still invited me to his wedding.
2. I poo quite regularly and normally now.
3. And I never take drugs.
4. Vic dared me to blog a virtually unbloggable reminiscence involving old men, park toilets and a used condom, but my family read this blog, so I won't. I don't think my mum is the type to be upset by drugs or poo.
5. I half hope the longtime ex who goes weirdqueasy about shit reads this post. And recalls the other two anecdotes I didn't blog. Hah!
6. I ate all those scones.
7. Normal service will be resumed when I'm not ill any more.

Divorce Me 5

< contextual info >
I was so upset because the ex-DH came over on Monday night and had an attack of the mean reds in front of me. I don't really blame her for that, and it only lasted five minutes, but it involved my having to confirm that I didn't want to get back together.
Saying it aloud, to her, destroyed me, it really did.

So it goes.

sanity regained

Now Playing: LBC talk radio, full of ranting phone-in loons

Just read this in yesterday's newspaper:

"Just been dumped? Why not lie awake at night, staring at the ceiling, and think about everything that's wrong with your life. Ah, bliss.
Don't worry about being single. Remember, swans mate for life, and look how bad-tempered they are."

I don't know what happened to my side bar on the left. I'm pretty sure that a link spontaneously self-translated itself to Japanese, and broke angelfire. Of course, it doesn't sound so convincing when I email them this story, and beg them to delete it for me. Given the abuse I've piled on the helpdesk of late, I'm unsurprised. However, that strip of brown poo along the left hand side functioned pretty much like a blog version of your mobile; it means I've lost the addresses of all the good blogs in the ether. Bah. I shall have to go out, make contact with the world, instead.
Horrors.

Duch came over and tried to persuade me to sell the flat last night. I managed to get a mortgage five times my salary, but have two weeks to decide if I want to take it,or to sell up. I was surprised to see that my poxy flat in 1.61 Kilometre End is roughly akin to somewhere in Kensington in price. This means as long as I live somewhere either pikey or inaccessible, I can buy something pretty. Look here, at the flat listed in SE9, which is next door to the gorgeous Eltham Palace, and take the virtual tour. It's halfway to Brighton, and officially no-one would ever visit me again. I love modern buildings (god rot Victorian terraces with iron fireplaces, gimme a purpose built 1960's brutalist monstrosity anyday). I don't think I'd have the money to furnish it with pianos, though.

"this had bad idea written all over it"

Now Playing: Bob Dylan: 'Fourth Time Around'

Well. I had no idea at all I could cry that much, or that long.

They say you learn something new every day.

Easily Ignored Clues that you haven't RECOVERED yet

Mood:  accident prone
Now Playing: The Chemical Brothers

1. You can't focus your moth-attention on a teev, but [sniff] you reckon that you can [cough] follow a [splutter] recipe alright.
2. Any recipe that calls for one large egg can just as easily be made with three small blue coloured ones from mutant chickens, right?
3. When cooking scones, you realise after that you forgot to include any fruit, cherries or sugar. So you dump them all on top.
4. Your tea keeps going cold.
5. Your scones are meant to look like the ones on the left. But instead, they accidentally come out shit. Like this:

6. Just one scone is enough to give you diarrhoea. You eat three, out of stubbornness.
7. You zip through pages of the shit novel you were reading, but you can't concentrate enough to read even a half page article of the Spectator.
8. Similarly, you zoom through an old piss-stained Cosmo with not one of the usual my-brain-has-been-vaccuumed side-effects.
9. While driving at 35 mph to the shops, it seems safe enough to take off your specs and fish out an eyelash.
10. If the clocks have gone back an hour, it must therefore be alright to stay up till 5am.
11. The |bankmanager| asks if you have any life assurance, and you respond: "Hunh? Eh? I have flu."
12. Everyone else in the world sounds very far away.
12. You allow the shopmidgetlady to paint a stripe of dark orange flaky foundation along the left side of your jaw.
13. And thank her for the attention.
14. Everything you see or haer begins to connect up. People ring when you think about them. The muzak in the cafe refers back to a film you once saw before you slept with someone you've not seen for years. You read a book with 'four'in the title a day before buying a Dylan CD with 'four' on it. Like, your whole life is a pattern.
15. Yup, exactly like that acid trip in '92.
16. Uh-ohhh.
17. You say to |bankmanager|: "Sorry. I'm shit at adding up." Then you steal their calculator when you think they're not looking.
18. Of course they're bloody looking. You've been miswriting the number three and crossing it out for the past 90 minutes in front of them.
19. A cup of tea seems to magically last three hours.
20. The |bankmanager| tells you you're going to be poor for some years to come, so it seems logical to spend your last coins on a few trip-hop CDs.
21. And some Radiohead. Even though you've always loudly pitied people who listen to Radiohead.
22. You invite your ex of ... oooh ... fifteen days ... over for tea. Surely you should both be past the hysterical stage by now?

Wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong.