I'm unsettled. I will eventually write something more meditative on why I'm unsettled - the short story is that I'm trying to "kick the bird", actually several birds, and this is day one - but right now I'm still going through it, and it's making me squirrely.
I broke down and made food ten minutes ago (was trying to fast, will try again tomorrow I guess) because I'm too hot (that's the excercise) and I couldn't sleep. The weird visual imprecations the media gallery on the left make as I type remind me of the freeze frame images I used to get while high on speed back in J's garden years ago.
Hitchens hates cliche because Martin Amis hates cliche and I agree that they are right and yet at the same time they are so, so terribly wrong. Martin Amis is more wrong because he is also (and these things are related) a grammar nazi, which misses the point and purpose of grammar. David Cameron will make a shitty PM for the same reasons Gordon Brown was a shitty PM, with the added handicap that his party will fuck up an already worsening relationship with Europe at a time when the UK could really use someone who won't fuck up relations with Europe.
I can't explain what tonight feels like. Something is askew.
I'm reading Dea's comment on my previous post and I miss her sensitivity and intelligence and wit and for the life of me I can't tell whether I agree that I was talking about something different from her or not. I can't quite tell what I was trying to say and I find it harder still to parse out what she was trying to say and then the boat sinks completely long before I compare the two.
I think a big part of what I was trying to say - what I feel more, now - is that our lives as human beings, in the western world at least, are more and more becoming intricate constructs of myths, none of which are true. And the most pervasive, the most dangerous, of those myths are the ones concerning our own identities and who we are and how we relate to others and what we value. I've seen this in America's war on work, in Jamie Oliver's doomed campaign to change the way we relate to food... the things we believe are ours, the things we believe are worth striving for, there's a whole gestalt I'm just skimming the surface of here that's deeply fucked up in our culture now, and the age thing was just one tiny part of it.
And that's enough of me raving like a paranoid hobo on a street corner for a little while longer. The curried yams are finally digesting and it's time to try and sleep for a bit. Hopefully the next thing I write will actually be interesting, if only to me.
