What I'm doing...

Lovin' it.

I know that having a wellspring of positivity is what a psychowhatsit would call manic-depressive disorder but it feels like a wave, sometimes, that you can surf right onto the beach, step off the board, give a big, cheesy smile, wave "Hi kids" and stride off into the sunset.

It is not being in control. Being in control is depressing. It means your life lacks possibilities if you are able to rein it in. It is not caring about being out of control. I'm dangerous when I feel like this. I could make inappropriate friendships. (Well, they feel appropriate to me.) Some of those have taken me years to shed.

But fuck, I'm good to know if you don't mind someone who won't shut up.

It's good timing for me because I am taking my driving test tomorrow. And if I didn't feel good about it, I would probably run away from it, be too nervous to succeed and so on.

I would also be drowning in the way things are in my life. But I'm realising that just inviting everyone who thinks I owe them something just because they deign to acknowledge my existence to fuck off if they don't like it really does work for me.

I prefer take it or leave it. I think I'm worth it. I prefer I can't stop and carry you, walk for yourself, because taking on your burden drags me into the ooze.

Listening to Interpol.

They are often compared to Joy Division, but where Joy Division were bleak, Interpol are joyous. Joy Division were about the heart, the edge of oblivion, looking into the abyss and having look back at you. Interpol are about desire. One is inward; the other looks out.

I have also been listening to the Editors, another band compared to Joy Division. The comparison serves only to illustrate how low on imagination, thoughtless and lazy music critics are. The Editors are actually Play Dead reincarnated. If you're not a connoisseur of eighties Goth (and so few are, darling), you are scratching your head, but it's all there: underdeveloped riffs, "meaningful" lyrics, deep but not soulful voice. Interpol are different; they have a lot more arse. The Editors wouldn't know an allusion if it bit them but Interpol aim for the evocative. Still, I like the Editors. They're earnest and I prefer earnestness to "archness", that particularly British knowingness, fed by read but not digested books, that strays way too close to knownothingness. Yes, I'm talking about Franz Fucking Ferdinand.

Masturbating lying down.

If anyone has a theory why it works, I'd like to hear it. All I know is that it does.

Learning statistics.

I know, but you're asking the wrong question. You don't mean, why would you want to? You mean, why would I want to?

It's obvious why I'd want to. Francis Bacon is said to have known everything there was to know, in his day. That's impossible now, but you can at least know what people are banging on about. I edit books on statistics without grasping any of it. That has to stop. And I want to be able to understand when I read the newspaper what is actually being said. It all started with opinion polls. I wondered what the basis was for considering them a good means of working out what the population would actually do.

And I'm curious, now I think about it, could we make decisions not by referendum but by survey? How could we model a survey that worked?

I'm assuming a system of government that wasn't self-interested and didn't feel the need to rig the survey. Yes, such a thing is not likely to exist ever (although the Ottomans came close with their boy tribute by creating a class of administrators whose interests were entirely the same as the state's).

Thinking the best.

I probably don't have more than the average evil shitheads in my life, appearances notwithstanding. Anyway, I have to start liking people more. It's too lonely to work every day in my basement and think that the outside world is hostile.

Faith in people is not easy but I've always had it. I put their errors and omissions down less to venality and more to lesser sins, such as laziness, complacency or ignorance. Perhaps that's why they so often disappoint me. I ought maybe to adopt a more vigorous misanthropy and cheerfully join the throng on equal terms. But it's not what I feel and they never yet, that I know of, made a cure for feelings that didn't give you a hangover.

posted by Dr Zen @ 5:26 pm