Waiting for the sirens' call

As it is, when it was is my favourite song. There's no good reason. It's just another New Order song, but I never tire of it.

It sounds like the exhilaration I sometimes feel. It sounds like a person has taken flight and although they are not in control of their wings, they do not want to land. It sounds like success.

Waiting for the sirens' call was not made by New Order. They got someone else in to do it. They hired some session musos and said, Take the piss. They asked someone to make turgid, workaday music that doesn't thrill me.

It hurts that someone I love has so cruelly let me down.

***

I do not make a great fanatic because I am not a good follower. Being a follower means accepting everything. Following a thing, an ism, a creed, means swallowing a belief whole. But I have too many questions for that. I could not be a communist. Although I feel Marx was right that history is largely about economic struggle between different classes, he wasn't clear on why. He also was short on ideas about how the state would wither away.

I don't believe states are in the business of withering.

Neither could I be an anarchist. I think people *should be able to* self-organise. They should be able to find a way to love and respect each other enough to create a world that is fair to all.

But they don't. It is far too implausible for me to espouse it as a cause. An endpoint of a revolution, maybe, a tool for change, definitely, a way of thinking, only if you can ignore that people are people.

***

Songs sometimes become attached to people for me. If I care about you at all, you probably have a song. For Zenella, for instance, it is Vapour trail. No reason. It just makes me think of her. It feels like aspiration to me.

I feel clumsy with words today, this week. Not a good thing for an editor. I have been unwell, a stomach bug, and I have been suffering from headaches. It's a poor excuse but editing involves concentrating. I am thinking that the people I work for won't send me any more work. It's not rational. They rate me. I'm doing a fucking poor job though. I didn't notice that there were no figures for chapter 7. It wasn't a huge big deal but it's part of what I do.

I hate doing it. I'd like to do something I'd actually be good at. A manuscript doctor maybe. But who would pay me to do that?

I am not whining. The sound you hear is my fingers' scrabbling on the metal as I slide down the chute.

posted by Dr Zen @ 2:36 pm