What are you thinking?
What am I thinking about? You don't ask and wonder why I would have secrets.
I am thinking about the valley spread out beneath the range, the scattered farms, how lonely they must be. I am thinking about the view from the ridge, and how I cannot look without imagining our tumbling over the edge; the shade of the trees as we climb into the rainforest; how it is like another world on these quiet roads, another world far away from suburban Brisbane, an Australia you could love if you had any love left in your heart.
I am thinking about Zenita, her hair in the wind, always wanting to be swung harder, higher, faster. I am thinking about how it must feel good to lack fear. It has defined my life, carved it into shapes that I do not fit comfortably.
***
I am thinking about how difficult it is to love someone who is crazy, especially if they do not want to change, or worse, want to but do not want to know about how to. I am thinking how little I learned; how little I have learned from anything. I mean in practical terms; I have learned nothing much that I can actually use to make a life, just useless shit that anyone could have who could be bothered to fill their head with it.
You know I do not mind being a passenger. Even though I drive now, I do not mind letting her drive. I just look out at the countryside and let my mind drift; not that it ever does anything else.
I am thinking that Zenita does not have Zenella's looks but she compensates by being so alive, so interested in life... why when I look at them am I always thinking about opportunities that can be squandered? Why do I trust others to drive but I don't trust myself not to fuck up? Do you get what you pay for? If you think you are going to make things shit, are you doomed to prove yourself right?
I do not judge them in that way anyway.
***
I am thinking that it's a pity when milk sours but if it didn't, there would be no yoghurt. I am thinking about men on horses who cooked their steak under the saddle. Were they like us or is the difference so great that we have to think that they were irredeemably Other? How can you know?
Really, you cannot tell with people who are very much like you, or should be, because they will always surprise you. I am often surprised, but rarely in a good way, when people are just so fucking dim about things. Maybe they are thinking the same about me. I'm not kidding myself that my answers are any better than theirs; I only respect them more because they're mine. If I was
that smart, I would not be editing reports at 11 at night. I would be flying, untethered, free and clear, miles above this shit. But I am not. I am down in it, getting covered, stinking.
I am thinking nameless, formless thoughts, that I should take a knife and tear myself into strips, that I should stop chasing myself around my own head, that I should be kinder and happier, that I should find love in my heart and put aside hate, that I should learn to hate and put aside softheartedness, that I should eat more seeds and less wheat. I am thinking that thinking is overrated, and just listening to the songs as the weed takes a grip is much better.
I am thinking that you should reach out to me, because I am lonely, and I can't do it. I'm scared of the void; scared of judgements that weigh me too lightly, even if that is all I deserve; scared of everything. I am not big. This body lies about me. I am thinking that if I had a shell I could disappear into, you would never see me again. Yet...
"Vote for me, I'm a fuckhead."In anything approaching a sane world, this man would have no chance, none whatsoever, of being elected leader of the most powerful state. His only appeal is that he gives less of a fuck about other human beings than the other candidates (with the exception of Rudy, who, although painted as a "social liberal" because he doesn't think women should be denied the right to choose what to do with their own bodies, is a fascist).
There's some debate, largely sparked by Al Gore's recent book, over whether Americans are morons. Well, of course they are, but I don't think they're any more moronic than anyone else. Take a look at Australia, for example. The Liberals (cunningly called that despite being our conservative party) stood on a platform that the first thing they would do was introduce workplace legislation that would make it easier to sack workers without reason. Those who don't think turkeys can be convinced to vote for Christmas would be well advised to check out the last election here because the Liberals are strongly supported by working people. Like all good rightists, the Liberals appeal to the masses' racism and fear, which generally overcome the plain fact that they have the intention of fucking the masses as soon as they get their hands on power.
No, I don't think that Americans are bigger morons than the rest of us. They are on balance horrible though. They worship militarism, are jingoists, indulge themselves in shocking greed as though it was their birthright, hate other cultures and other peoples with a vehemence that shocks those of us from more tolerant places, believe everyone should have a gun and be willing to shoot others with it, half of them hate women sufficiently not to want them to be permitted to control their own reproduction and hate gays even more, so much so that they want to constitute their nation as a place in which gays cannot be married, and don't let's go into the half of the nation -- half the fucking population! -- who think atheists have made up evolution just to piss them off. One could go on but it makes me feel a bit ill to think about how ugly they are. (Spare me the comments about how nasty I am to be so anti-American -- you guys have been buying the hatred for many years, wearing out your credit from WW2 and your being founded on Enlightenment principles, which you are betraying with barely a fight.)
I know it is not all of them, but it is enough of them that a squeaking stuffed turd like Fred Thompson genuinely feels he has a chance of becoming president. It's not a surprise; after all, when asked whether they "believed" in evolution -- a demonstrable fact, not an item of faith -- some of the Repugnicunt candidates raised their hands to say no. Actually, fuck it, I take it back. Whatever I think of Americans, clearly the likes of Sam Brownback think they are moron enough to vote for a man who doesn't "believe" in science.
Not original or interesting
So it is about four on a Thursday afternoon and I have nothing to say. I mean, there are things I could say but they are not original or interesting.
I could tell you about the music I have been listening to. Right now I have
Burial's album on. The genre is dubstep, which is quite new to me, but if you are thinking dark DnB with a UK garage inflection, you're close enough. For the uninitiated, it's a kind of dance music that it would be nearly impossible to dance to, unless you are willing to look like a spastic zombie. I have also been loving
Candie Payne. When I was a kid, my mum and dad had only a few records, mostly singles, and the likes of Cilla Black and Petunia Clark featured heavily. I asked my dad the other day why he totally ignored Motown, Stax, the Velvet Underground and the Doors, and he said he just didn't feel the need to follow the herd. Perhaps he didn't understand the question. Anyway, I'm very fond of the sixties chick belters, particularly Cilla, who made some brilliant records (hard to believe when you see her doing her professional Scouser teeth and gorblimey act on Blind Date or the hideous Surprise Surprise, but Anyone who had a heart stands up against anything from the sixties in my view), and Dusty (if you do not feel tears spring to your eyes when you hear I close my eyes and count to ten, you do not love music or love love either for that matter). Candie does a bang up to date take on that theme. I have a huge soft spot for distinctive female voices (from Bjork through Liz Frazer to Lisa Gerrard, stopping at all stations Aretha and Candi), and Candie has one. Not as strong, maybe, as some of those other names, but still big and brassy.
I could tell you about Stanthorpe, where I spent a long weekend just now. But what can I tell you that you wouldn't find if you googled it? You can't taste the wine I tasted; you can't see the sunset drenching the big sky with pinks and yellows; you can't hear the crackle of logs on a blazing fire. At the cellar door of Tobin's (which I recommend to you if you like your wine with fruit; those, like me, who prefer a chewier red might direct themselves instead to the excellent Wild Soul), my father is saying that he doesn't mind immigrants but they should learn English, to some acclaim from Mr Tobin and our driver.
Why though? I ask. What concern is it of mine whether someone speaks English? If they work and pay taxes, they can speak whatever they like. But people need to integrate, my dad says. Why? I ask. What difference does it make to you? My dad is not a particularly outgoing person, and I don't think it would bother him if everyone else in the country spoke Chinese. He just spouts this shit because the Mail writes it.
The thing is, we don't really have anything to fear from immigrants, even if their ways are different from ours. Changes to a culture happen quite slowly and unpredictably, and most places tend to be conservative to the point of inertia. And changes are not necessarily, or often, harmful. My mother, on the same subject, claims we are being "swamped". There were queues when they opened up the UK to eastern Europe, she says. She saw them on TV. Yes, I say, there were queues on day one. But no one filmed day two.
We were not swamped, of course. The reason not is simple. Romanians do not want to live in the UK; they want to live in Romania. They too want to be around people who speak their language, eat the food they eat, dance the dances they dance. I don't see why it is a good thing to insist they stop. Are our things really that much better? We make the mistake of thinking that they are because we are rich. We think we are rich because of something about us. But we are not. We are rich because we exploited the rest of the world and are surfing on the wave of richness that brought us.
Anyway, the world has a gradient of wellbeing and people will tend to move up that gradient if they can. The poor will pursue affluence if they have the opportunity. You and I would too, in their shoes. The route to resolving our worries about immigration is quite obviously not to wall ourselves in and them out, or to try to force them to become us, but to smooth the gradient as best we can. Then we'll have to find other reasons to hate each other.
We can always rely on the old standbys: hating people for being a different gender or for liking different sex than we do. I saw a smidgen of Richard Dawkins on the idiot box the other day. He was talking to a gayhater who was quoting the Bible on the subject. Naturally, this man felt bound by the writings of some halfcrazed arsewit who lived in a culture and in a place very different from the mid-American hellhole he was himself polluting. Well, it saves you from having to think for yourself, I suppose. It's difficult for a sceptic like me to understand completely people who feel life is best lived without encumbering themselves with contemplation, but of course I see the attraction. You can avoid responsibility. Accepting a scripture allows you to become a soldier, following orders that you cannot control, which permits you to tackle difficult issues as though they were simple. It makes life easier, and we all love an easy life.
Yes, I understand the attraction but life is fascinating precisely because it is complex and difficult to understand. Or seems that way. Whether it actually is all that complicated is another question. Perhaps there are more than one level of complexity. Take homosexuality. It is not all that complicated that some of us want to fuck the same sex. It's just how you feel, after all, what strikes you as fuckable. But the reasons you feel that way may well be complex. I suppose it's too much to expect Xtian idiots to want to think about the complex reasons for their simple feelings about gayness.
This album really is very good. I don't know what has led me to loving this stuff, but I do. I am not dancing though. I already look and feel like a zombie, without needing to dance like one to prove it. (The zombie fixation is a product of having watched the mildly amusing Shaun of the Dead.)
At Underwater World
A shark floats above my head. It is as if it were flying. It is alarming when it comes up from behind. I feel like I could reach up and touch its sleek underside. The shark does not look so much vicious as it does stupid, its mouth hanging lazily open. I am wondering why the sharks do not attack and eat the other fish. Perhaps they are just that well fed, or simply do not eat the types of fish they are housed with.
Naughtyman is enjoying the sharks but he does not go too close to the glass. He prefers to run up and down, shouting "hello, hello", anyway. He is a simple, warmhearted boy. He has taken to his granny in a big way. He is always pulling her by the hand, wanting to share with her. He wants to visit their house, he says. I think my children would be happier -- although there is not much in it because they are happy children -- in the UK. But I would think that!
I am not a fan of zoos or the like, but Zenella went to Underwater World on a school trip and wanted to go again. I knew I would be fascinated, even as I didn't approve. But I was even more interested than I had thought. Undersea is truly another planet.
For some reason, Underwater World has a small collection of animatronic dinosaurs. They are not very convincing but they convince Naughtyman. The rubber and plastic T Rex roars at him and he screams and starts howling. "I want to go home," he cries. I pick him up. There is nothing I like more in this life than to be a safe haven for my kids. Naughtyman pulls himself as close as he could, burying his face in my neck. Curiously,
I feel safer when they do that. It makes me feel strong and bold, capable.
How much I love them! Sometimes I can scarcely look at them, my heart pounds so hard. I am overwhelmed by a nameless emotion. Whenever I feel sorry that my life has taken twists I would wish it had not, I remind myself that they are the destination it led to.
I remember when the bush down in the park at the end of our road was on fire. The sky was full of smuts, the smell of smoke overpowering. Naughtyman was as scared by it as he had ever been. I made the children tea and sat them at the dining table. Zenella would go to look at the fire, which meant being out of sight on the verandah, and Naughtyman would cry. "Where's Zenella?" he sobbed. He was scared that the fire had come to get her.
In the end, he couldn't take any more. He climbed into my lap and cuddled in. I held him close, and if I moved, he made me move back, so he was cradled just so. Eventually, he fell asleep, and I put him down in his cot. Usually, he will wake in the late evening, and ask for water, or a cuddle. But that night he slept through.
At Underwater World
A shark floats above my head. It is as if it were flying. It is alarming when it comes up from behind. I feel like I could reach up and touch its sleek underside. The shark does not look so much vicious as it does stupid, its mouth hanging lazily open. I am wondering why the sharks do not attack and eat the other fish. Perhaps they are just that well fed, or simply do not eat the types of fish they are housed with.
Naughtyman is enjoying the sharks but he does not go too close to the glass. He prefers to run up and down, shouting "hello, hello", anyway. He is a simple, warmhearted boy. He has taken to his granny in a big way. He is always pulling her by the hand, wanting to share with her. He wants to visit their house, he says. I think my children would be happier -- although there is not much in it because they are happy children -- in the UK. But I would think that!
I am not a fan of zoos or the like, but Zenella went to Underwater World on a school trip and wanted to go again. I knew I would be fascinated, even as I didn't approve. But I was even more interested than I had thought. Undersea is truly another planet.
For some reason, Underwater World has a small collection of animatronic dinosaurs. They are not very convincing but they convince Naughtyman. The rubber and plastic T Rex roars at him and he screams and starts howling. "I want to go home," he cries. I pick him up. There is nothing I like more in this life than to be a safe haven for my kids. Naughtyman pulls himself as close as he could, burying his face in my neck. Curiously,
I feel safer when they do that. It makes me feel strong and bold, capable.
How much I love them! Sometimes I can scarcely look at them, my heart pounds so hard. I am overwhelmed by a nameless emotion. Whenever I feel sorry that my life has taken twists I would wish it had not, I remind myself that they are the destination it led to.
I remember when the bush down in the park at the end of our road was on fire. The sky was full of smuts, the smell of smoke overpowering. Naughtyman was as scared by it as he had ever been. I made the children tea and sat them at the dining table. Zenella would go to look at the fire, which meant being out of sight on the verandah, and Naughtyman would cry. "Where's Zenella?" he sobbed. He was scared that the fire had come to get her.
In the end, he couldn't take any more. He climbed into my lap and cuddled in. I held him close, and if I moved, he made me move back, so he was cradled just so. Eventually, he fell asleep, and I put him down in his cot. Usually, he will wake in the late evening, and ask for water, or a cuddle. But that night he slept through.
Noodling
I am eating Pot Noodle. When I tell you it was made by Unilever, the soap-powder conglomerate, you know exactly what type of food it is. I have been missing them for three long years. Gawd bless mothers!
Pedant, consede
Ah, 'tis a perilous business, to be a pedant. The urge to look very clever can so easily have you looking very stupid. Best not get into it if you do not recognise the pitfalls. One pitfall is
supercede.
Although Brian is correct that "supersede" is the more common usage, although "supercede" is so commonly used that one might consider it a variant, rather than an error, he is all wrong about its etymology, leading him to say some stupid things.
If only supersede did come from a word meaning "sit above"! The sedan chair thing would then be almost poetic, a lovely etymology. Sadly, it's wrong, and curiously, it turns out that "supersede" is the variant, albeit the one that stuck.
Worse still, English borrowed the word as "supercede", because the word it borrowed was "superceder". The word that descended from was "supersedere", spelled with an "s". Yes, the Frenchies cannot spell.
And it gets much worse. Although "supersedere" strictly meant "to sit above", the French word meant "to delay" (among other meanings such as "to desist", which it also bore in Latin), and it was borrowed into English with that meaning.
Pedant, consede
Ah, 'tis a perilous business, to be a pedant. The urge to look very clever can so easily have you looking very stupid. Best not get into it if you do not recognise the pitfalls. One pitfall is
supercede.
Although Brian is correct that "supersede" is the more common usage, although "supercede" is so commonly used that one might consider it a variant, rather than an error, he is all wrong about its etymology, leading him to say some stupid things.
If only supersede did come from a word meaning "sit above"! The sedan chair thing would then be almost poetic, a lovely etymology. Sadly, it's wrong, and curiously, it turns out that "supersede" is the variant, albeit the one that stuck.
Worse still, English borrowed the word as "supercede", because the word it borrowed was "superceder". The word that descended from was "supersedere", spelled with an "s". Yes, the Frenchies cannot spell.
And it gets much worse. Although "supersedere" strictly meant "to sit above", the French word meant "to delay" (among other meanings such as "to desist", which it also bore in Latin), and it was borrowed into English with that meaning.
Hilariously, the Washington Post has been running a series of opinion pieces in which leading neocons weasel and whine about their roles in the Iraq fuckup. Latest to lie through his teeth is
Paul Bremer. The piece is called "What we got right in Iraq", but it's not, as you might have expected, a blank page.
Bremer says:
Looking for a neat, simple explanation for our current problems in Iraq, pundits argue that these two steps alienated the formerly ruling Sunnis, created a pool of angry rebels-in-waiting and sparked the insurgency that's raging today. The conventional wisdom is as firm here as it gets. It's also dead wrong.
But we are not looking for a simple explanation at all. We already have one. Our current problems in Iraq stem from one huge mistake: invading in the first place. Following that up by empowering Viceroy Coco the Clown just compounded teh stupid.
Bremer compares Saddam with Hitler, particularly unconvincingly; a comparison that does him no favours, because the occupation of Germany was well handled, and its army was reformed rather than disbanded.
Bremer claims that he had no choice but to rid Iraq of Saddam's security services to give it a chance of a bright future. Well, that worked. In the sense that disbanding the Metropolitan police would make London a harmonious place to live. And worse than that, of course, because one would not be sacking thousands of men with guns, and presenting them with no prospect of work.
Bremer suggests that deBaathification was essential. To some extent, this is probably true, although Hussein was a cult leader much more so than simply the figurehead of a vicious movement. The Baath party were simply Sunni Arab nationalists. Bremer overstates their influence (and lies about history more than once), particularly making far too much of their pervasiveness. Lots of people were communists in Russia, but that doesn't mean they were all involved in heinous breaches of human rights, nor does it mean that it would have been a good idea had everyone in the CP been punished when communism collapsed.
Arguably, what Iraq needed was South Africa-style reconciliation, not a post-WWII-style purge. Fair trials for the worst, yes, and a public accounting, yes, but going further than that almost certainly was a mistake, for the simple reason that whereas the Nazis shared a nationality with nonNazis, Baathists are almost all Sunnis.
Bremer says:
Our goal was to rid the Iraqi government of the small group of true believers at the top of the party, not to harass rank-and-file Sunnis.
But that is not how his actions appeared to the Iraqi people. Particularly not when he
turned over the implementation of this carefully focused policy to Iraq's politicians
by which one should read "Iraq's Shiite majority politicians". Who were, as Bremer, notes, enthusiastic supporters of deBaathification. And of militias that began executing Baathists, which -- and Bremer even noted the pervasiveness of Baathism -- meant most Sunnis.
Having accepted that he got deBaathification practically wrong, although he doesn't accept that there was a conceptual problem with entirely disempowering an ethnic group in the way he did (much more radically than he claims), he goes on to lie about history a little to smear the Baathists:
It's somewhat surprising at this late date to have to remind people of the old army's reign of terror. In the 1980s, it waged a genocidal war against Iraq's minority Kurds
This is thoroughly untrue. Iraq fought a war with Iran in the 1980s, which the Kurds involved themselves in. The Kurds saw a chance to push for autonomy and took it. Whether nations have a right to defend themselves against secession and if so, what lengths are reasonable to go to in that defence are difficult questions to answer. I'm not an apologist for Saddam, but I don't think this is clearcut. And we are not invading Turkey, which has also been fighting its Kurds for many years, using weapons we have sold them, so I find it hard to believe we had much concern for the Kurds, or even do today.
killing hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians
Absolutely not. It is a common, ridiculous neocon lie that Saddam was a top-league mass-murderer. It's simply echoing lies that were spread before the war, the tittletattle of those with reason to want Saddam removed.
Kurd civilians were killed, but not hundreds of thousands. Again, I am not an apologist for Saddam but I do not think we are well served by lies.
and more than 5,000 people in a notorious chemical-weapons attack on the Kurdish town of Halabja.
Both sides in the Iran-Iraq war used chemical weapons. It is entirely abhorrent but this was not out of the usual. There is considerable confusion over what actually happened, but it seems that the Iraqis attacked Iranian units in Halabja with chems. The number of civilians killed is not known.
Iraqi government documents found since the war have confirmed that Saddam authorised gas attacks against military units, and Saddam was delighted to take responsibility. No documents show that he authorised their use against civilians.
When condemning the Iraqis for using chemical weapons (which I unreservedly do, and I would gladly have seen Saddam tried for it), we should recall that the United States has used them on several occasions in Iraq. It has also used huge fuel-air bombs, which destroy and kill indiscriminately, and of course it has quite wilfully murdered many thousands of civilians.
Furthermore, we sold Saddam the technology. We knew he was dangerously unstable, and we knew he would likely use his chems against Iran. We didn't mind that. We didn't mind his attacking the Kurds either, because Turkey is much more important to us strategically than a bunch of nobodies living in the hills.
After the 1991 Persian Gulf War, Iraq's majority Shiites rose up against Hussein, whose army machine-gunned hundreds of thousands of men, women and children and threw their corpses into mass graves.
This is also not true. No mass graves on this scale have been found, and very few Iraqis are prepared to say that these massacres happened. Yes, there was a revolt. Yes, people were killed. But again, no one is well served by simply lying about the numbers.
Bremer continues to lie:
Moreover, any thought of using the old army was undercut by conditions on the ground. Before the 2003 war, the army had consisted of about 315,000 miserable draftees, almost all Shiite, serving under a largely Sunni officer corps of about 80,000.
This is not quite true. You can figure out for yourself how likely an army with one officer for every four men is, and how likely an army with absolutely no noncommissioned regulars is.
The Shiite conscripts were regularly brutalized and abused by their Sunni officers.
But they were paid.
When the draftees saw which way the war was going, they deserted and, like their officers, went back home. But before the soldiers left, they looted the army's bases right down to the foundations.
In truth, the soldiers were in their homes, having read American leaflets that told them that if they stayed home, they would not be targets. The American administrators had believed that they would actually stay in their garrisons -- effectively guarding them -- but they did not, and the barracks and, importantly, ammo dumps were thoroughly looted.
So by the time I arrived in Iraq, there was no Iraqi army to disband.
This simply is not true, and it's astonishing that Bremer would lie so. The army may not have been in the field, but we had its lists, and had we recalled it, the army could easily have been re-formed.
Disbanding the army sent out a signal to the Iraqis. In plain terms, the message was "You're fucked". We took away any semblance of security, and put many thousands of armed men out of work.
Some in the U.S. military and the CIA's Baghdad station suggested that we try to recall Hussein's army.
Because the military and the CIA are not stuffed full of political appointees, they still had people who could think.
We refused, for overwhelming practical, political and military reasons.
Which you will have to try not to laugh when you read them.
For starters, the draftees were hardly going to return voluntarily to the army they so loathed
No, they'd much prefer to be unemployed.
we would have had to send U.S. troops into Shiite villages to force them back at gunpoint.
This is just ridiculous. You have to remind yourself that Bremer did not even try to recall the army, so this is just so much bullshit. The likelihood is that simply reforming the officer corps would have made the idea of return much more palatable. The Iraqis, it should be noted, were furious that the Americans did this. The Americans were seen as vindictive, dishonourable.
And even if we could have assembled a few all-Sunni units, the looting would have meant they'd have no gear or bases.
Bremer tries to have it both ways: earlier he claimed that the soldiers looted their own barracks; now he claims they would not have any equipment because of the looting. However, much of the looting happened after his order to disband the army, as people realised that they could simply help themselves to anything that wasn't nailed down.
Moreover, the political consequences of recalling the army would have been catastrophic. Kurdish leaders made it clear to me that recalling Hussein-era forces would make their region secede, which would have triggered a civil war and tempted Turkey and Iran to invade Iraq to prevent the establishment of an independent Kurdistan.
This is total bullshit. It's impossible to believe that the Kurds said any such thing. They had already gained an autonomous, mostly peaceful region. They may have liked to see the hated Iraqi army humbled, but they are not stupid.
Many Shiite leaders who were cooperating with the U.S.-led forces would have taken up arms against us if we'd called back the perpetrators of the southern killing fields of 1991.
Name them. I mean, really. No one was going to be upset by maintaining security except those with something to benefit from chaos. But deep in here lays a kernel of truth.
What did Bremer do when he took power? He picked sides. We picked sides. We sided with the Shiites and allowed the Sunnis to suffer. So what is he saying here? Some of the people on our side, arseholes to the man, didn't want us to stand in the way of their punishment of the Sunni minority. Of course they didn't want the army recalled. They didn't want the Sunnis to have jobs and they didn't have any use for security. And still don't. The likes of Maliki, Chalabi, Talabani, al-Sadr, these men do not want a secure, stable Iraq. They want chaos, in which they and their buddies can enrich themselves, and in which they can carve out petty fiefdoms. The new tribal Iraq suits these men fine.
Finally, neither the U.S.-led coalition nor the Iraqis could have relied on the allegiance of a recalled army.
Bremer forgets that these are "the Iraqis". He means that they would not necessarily have been personally loyal to the Shiite strongmen we backed. But why should this have been a policy goal of ours? And why should it have been a concern? All that really would have mattered would have been that Iraq was reasonably secure, so that reconstruction could proceed.
Bremer talks about the Fallujah Brigade, recalled by the Marines, but later disbanded. What he does not mention is that the Marines did not so much recall an Iraqi army brigade as form a brigade out of the people it had just been fighting! Furthermore, he does not mention that the Marine commander of the attack on Fallujah a/ did not want to attack Fallujah (Bremer ordered him to), b/ did not want to leave Fallujah before finishing the job (Bremer ordered him out) and c/ did not want to arm the Fallujah Brigade but was ordered to do it. Arming former insurgents is not what we mean by recalling the army, of course.
Eventually, Bremer accepted that he had badly fucked up, and tried to create a new army. But the genie was out of the bottle by then. The Americans were not trusted, and many of the Sunnis who might have helped secure Iraq had joined in the civil war that is making it hell.
Monday 2.38pm
I'm listening to the leadoff track of Amon Tobin's The Foley room. The album has had mixed reviews but it's as good as anything he's released. If you like Tobin, you'll like it a lot. If you don't, you probably won't.
So I'm thinking about my guts. They have been bad for months, years even. I don't know what it is, and I don't want to know. It strikes me as a perverse wager. I could go to the doctor and find out that it's something like a persistent giardia infection, easily cleared up. Or I could find out I have irritable bowel syndrome or worse. The "or worse" is why I'm avoiding the doctor. I am scared to find out. I no longer feel too young to die. I've entered that stage of life where you feel you actually might be mortal. In the past couple of weeks though, I've been suffering from pain and bloating. I thought it might be food poisoning but it recurred. So I'll be doing a stool test.
You know your life is empty when the most interesting thing you have to write about is stomach pain.
I am also thinking about A, whose son is signing up to die in Preznit Bush's folly in Iraq. I feel desperately sorry for her. I know that most Americans believe that being in the military is something praiseworthy but Europeans are mostly sick of wars, and distrust people who are willing to fight them. I would be horrified if one of my children signed up.
Auden has never been so apt. One line in particular I find chilling:
Out of the air a voice without a face
Proved by statistics that some cause was just
The voices on Fox News have faces, sure enough, but they certainly lack the compassion that Auden wrote about:
him, who'd never heard
Of any world where promises were kept,
Or one could weep because another wept
The individualism that capitalism promotes creates of all of us mindless haters, desperate to acquire and defend our acquisitions. I have faith that we are not doomed to be like that, that we can rise above it, but sometimes the world seems so mired in the shit that that faith can be difficult to maintain. I do not have anyone to pray to, but if I did, I would be praying that A's son gets drunk and either does something that will get him a short jail sentence and a discharge or fails a medical or is disallowed from entering the army for some other reason.
I am also thinking about something spiteful that I wrote. It was unkind. But it was true. But I wrote it because I thought it would be hurtful. The truth often hurts. Sometimes you feel it is necessary to say the hurtful thing because of a benefit you perceive in it or simply because you do not care about the people you are hurting, and you are using the truthfulness of what you are saying to assuage your conscience. But that isn't the case here. I was operating out of spite.
But in thinking about it, I realise that I cannot articulate why I felt the need. I know that I felt it, and I know that it was justified in some way. But I cannot find the words for the justification. It just felt right.
I wonder whether more harm hasn't been done in this world by people's doing what feels right than any other thing.
Anyway, this sort of thing happens. Because I don't tend to be as demanding of them as my correspondents are of me, they sometimes feel they don't owe me decent treatment. Taking the opportunity to remind them that they do is as good a motivator for spite as any, if it can ever be said to be well motivated.
I am trying not to think about poker. I was playing an online final this morning with the prize of a seat in the WSOP potlimit holdem tourney. I wasn't going particularly well but I was still alive with 19 of 90 runners still playing, and within one double-up of the top five. So when someone minraised and I woke up with KK, I was delighted. I raised pot and they called. This guy had maybe double my stack but I think that this was arguably a poor call, given his holding. He was best case a coinflip and could simply have folded for his raise. If Lady Luck had been favouring me, the flop would have shown some paint, inducing a fold from villain, fearing overcards, but it was all rags. He checked and I pushed without hesitation, of course. He called with TT. Because this is a bad beat story, you know the rest. Now, I know that the pros will tell you that all you can do is get your money in ahead, blah blah, but it still hurts when that one in ten shot happens on
this occasion and not one of the other nine.
Someone asked me, does making progress like that mean you're getting better? Well, I don't know. Yes, I am, but how much is a difficult question to answer. In the short term, luck plays such a huge role in poker that you cannot know whether you are doing better or being luckier. I feel I am understanding some things better and still just not getting some others. You could see progress if you wanted to: I began by learning to play tight, which takes you this far, and have been learning the right spots for aggression, which takes you a bit further. Experience helps you with hand reading -- or at least helps you determine when you're facing a real hand or someone who's full of shit. But I have the perennial problem of not being able to chip up in tourneys, so that I often get to the bubble, and sometimes limp into the cash, but rarely have enough chips to go very deep. Do I lack gamble? I dunno. I'm trying to find spots to push a bit harder, and it's working for me, so maybe that's what I needed. At the same time, I mostly play low-limit sitngoes, where patience, discipline and shifting gears appropriately are the most important skills, so far as I can tell. But even there I'm a bit at sea. I am beating the game -- I'm confident that I am although my sample size is too small to merit confidence -- but I know that I do not take enough opportunities on the bubble. I could be beating it a lot more. The chief problem is that the strategy I use, which would be instantly familiar to anyone who reads 2+2, is much stronger in a wild game than it is in a tight one, and I'm not sure how to adjust to the latter. (It doesn't help that PokerRoom plays 8-minute blinds, which tends to make the play a bit faster than is good for me.) If there are five of us left at t100 blinds, I'm confident of making the money. If there are seven, not so much. What tends to happen in a tight game is that the players will not gamble early but are much too willing to gamble closer to the bubble. (In a loose game, players will be far too loose in the first few levels and then far too tight when shorthanded, which suits my strategy perfectly.) This means that they won't fold anywhere near optimally on the bubble, so it can be hard to play if you are running cold. If I have an M of less than 5 and there are seven left, I know I will need a slice of luck or some decent cards. I hate to have to rely on luck! The problem is, of course, that I have not been taking detailed notes, and in any case too few players are regulars, so I don't know which kind of game I'm in straight away. If I'm not paying enough attention, I do not necessarily get a good handle on my opponents. Well, there's one route to improvement right there!
I am now listening to Phantom limb by the Shins.
I am thinking ahead to Thursday, when my parents come to visit. I haven't seen them for at least a year, and I was pleasantly surprised when they told me they were coming. I have unreservedly good feelings about my parents. It is one of the blessings of age that I have been able to lay aside bitterness at their failings and allow myself to love them without conditions. When I think about Mrs Zen, and how it could be feasible to rebuild our relationship, I remind myself that my relationship with my father was poisoned, but now is good. I can happily sit and talk with him. I'm older and wiser, and can avoid areas of discord. He is not on the whole a bad person. He just fucked up. But you cannot punish someone for fucking up forever. Eventually, you have to be able to forgive them. Erring is human; forgiving too. I believe this because I believe I fuck up too, and I want to be forgiven. If I am not doing it on purpose, I do anyway. Or even if I am, if my reasons for it were not unforgivable but simply misguided, then I hope that others will forgive, and the price I pay is to be willing to forgive on my part.
Not that I find it difficult. My mother used to say when I was a child that I was notable for not holding a grudge. I still don't. Which is why I know that if I am taking "revenge" on someone who has slighted me, I'm almost certainly acting out of spite, rather than because I have residual bad feeling. (I'm wondering whether that makes sense. I know exactly what I mean. I pay you back because I'm vicious and think in some abstract way that you probably deserve it, not because I am punishing you for any particular crime you've committed.)
This SNG I'm playing now is a good example of what I was talking about. It's t150 and still eight players in the game! I have the big stack, so I'm under no pressure, but if I play pots, I'm going to have to be willing to put chips in. Just picked up TT and made it 4xBB to go. Bugger! Called by the guy to my left. Can you believe it? He had QJ and flopped a queen. This is how it's been going for me. Awful calls rewarded left right and centre. Luckily the pot was semiprotected by an allin guy, so I checked and folded. I am going to have to call an allin somewhere in here though, because I can't just fold into the money.
Wow! I wake up with AQ and call a tighty who might be pushing it a bit. He has 66. The flop comes Q6x. Oh noes! Turn Q, which means I'm still way way behind. LOLZ abound at the river A. Ah well; it's about time I handed one out.
Now it's tough. T200 and the other players have no idea how to play an SNG, so they are walking each other's blinds, limping into hands and basically playing horribly. This doesn't suit me. I want them to be battling it out with each other, of course.
So I bust one out. I limp into his big blind and he minraises. So I call of course with T9. The flop comes T high and I check, he pushes, I call. He shows A4 for bottom pair and doesn't improve. If he had pushed preflop, he probably would still be in the game. I would have pushed myself -- the strategy demands it -- but I think he would have called very wide there, having a quarter of his stack in as the blind.
In theory, I should be able to push nearly every hand. Here's where I struggle though. I just can't make myself push, because I know these guys are going to call wide and I'm not sure whether it's going to be +EV.
So get this. We're on the bubble and a guy gets a few chips, so that now he has a stack about the same size as mine. But instead of attacking the shorties, he keeps trying to steal my blind. I resteal a couple of times but I'm worried that he's only playing values and will eventually be stupid enough to call one. So I let him steal a couple. He has no idea how to play poker, obviously. So I pick up AQ and he raises. I push. He calls and shows 99. I flop a Q and MHIG. He had me covered by quite a bit, thanks to one of the shorties walking his blind or worse, calling it and then giving up on the flop. The guy starts to whine. You were lucky, he says. Dude, I say, you are totally retarded. Two shortstacks and you try to steal my blind instead of theirs! I wasn't trying to steal, I was trying to bust you, he whines. Oh. My. Gawd. Well, lord send me players like that, I suppose, because that's breathtakingly clueless. But worse was to come. The shortstack -- patently without a clue -- allowed himself to be blinded down so that he only had a big blind left. To my astonishment, both the other players folded! Here is the guy telling me I'm a donk and he doesn't know to limp and help me bust the shorty. Obviously, with more than two-thirds of the chips in play, I go on to win. The whiner ran his AQ into my AK, and then, to my absolute delight, I called a push HU with T4 suited in spades and laughed like a drain as I flushed. You lucky fuck, whined the whiner. Lollerchoppers! Yeah, but I was only in the position to get that lucky because he donated his stack to me.
Volta/The reminder
Opinion is divided on Bjork. Wayward genius or purveyor of shouty tuneless rubbish? Very few people are going to find themselves on the fence, even if both are sometimes true on the same record. This is the fate of "experimental" artists, in no matter which field. And Bjork is fiercely experimental. But is that a good thing? Well, Vespertine was dementedly brilliant, one of the high points of electronic music, but the jury's still out on Medulla. I think she deserved the chance to make an album that didn't quite work, and the notion that she had reached the end of what was possible with electronics, although debatable, was certainly explored in full.
Bjork claims that Volta is a pullback from the edge, her idea of a pop album. But it's no Debut. The latter had a quirky pop sensibility, most obviously on display in Human behaviour and Violently happy. This time, Bjork's desire to be difficult has smothered her sense of melody. In other words, you're going to struggle to dig a tune out of this mess.
The same cannot be said of Feist, whose The reminder is chockers with them. Let it die was a good album, with a couple of great songs, but it was patchy. The reminder is the real deal, just good song after good song. I could almost hear Dionne Warwick sing The limit to your love, but I don't think she'd better Leslie Feist, who puts her beautiful voice to good use.
When I see the word "jazz" in a music review, I reach for my AK, and "soft jazz" in particular provokes horrendous visions of Sade or Norah Jones. And perhaps the first few bars of So sorry will instil the fear that that is exactly what you're going to get. But I think that the pop wins out over the "jazz" stylings, and lifts this, a little at least, above "coffee table".
But it is pop. You won't need to knit your brow over this: it's light, fun, inventive. I defy you not to smile when you listen to Brandy Alexander and if you're not bopping along with My moon my man, you probably hate life.
I think the contrast is quite instructive, or could be for Bjork. Feist is not "experimental" but she does experiment across a range of styles. She puts her voice to good use, giving it winsome melodies to sing. I sometimes feel Bjork is scared of melody, scared that the limitations of her voice will be exposed if she actually has to sing a tune. When she does give it a whirl, on the pseudoballad Pneumonia, for instance, the outcome is just very tough listening. The singing is there but the tune entirely absent.
I am thinking about a child dying of diarrhoea in a hut in Mali.
I am thinking about a child robbed of opportunity because no one can afford to educate him.
I am thinking about a child starving to death -- starving to death, how is that even fucking possible in a world where we are growing corn to put in our cars -- because her mother does not have two grains of rice to rub together.
I am thinking about your
priorities.
It is a tragedy that we have never found a way to love each other. We measure it not in dollars, not even in the billions, but in the lives that went for nothing.
It is a tragedy that we have never learned that learning is the road to salvation for our planet. Ignorance drowns us -- literally, when our seas have risen and we die fighting over the high ground. Literate, affluent populations in the third world would not choke it with overpopulation, would not destroy each other in pointless, mindless wars. Who knows what potential we are wasting?
I am thinking about a mother's crying deep into the night on Bubaque island. I'll never forget that sound. It seems to me it is the song of our world: the sound of a lost tomorrow, waste and pain.
Settlements and walls are acts of war. I do not know how Israel can be spun as desirous of peace when it does this.
The MO is simple: build on land you've annexed, so that if the Palestinians refuse your "peace plan" because you haven't left them enough land to build a state on, you can claim they never wanted peace in the first place. Israel has focused a great deal of its resources on building up East Jerusalem, piece by piece making a Palestinian state a little less tenable.
I do not know how we can pretend any more that Israel wants peace. There has to be a point at which we say, you say you are negotiating but you only make demands; you say you want peace but you are making war; you say you want justice but you offer none.
I support a Jewish homeland. I think it's a terrible, racist idea, but I do not see any other resolution to the desire of Jews to have a place of their own that works. A single state would be consonant with my views on nationhood but nationalism is a powerful force that is not always amenable to reason. This goes both ways. It is not Jewish racism that leads me to support a Jewish state, but the Arab version. I fear that Jews would not survive a unified state. They cannot trust that we have the will to rescue them. We did not care to last time.
But I do not support a greater Israel. And it's time for our leaders to stop pretending that that is not what the Israeli right is creating.
I note this:
Mark Regev, a spokesman for the Israeli foreign ministry, said the government made no distinction between East Jerusalem and the rest of Israel. "There is a difference between Jerusalem, where we have sovereignty, and the West Bank where we do not and whose future will be the subject of future negotiations."
By simply defining chunks of the West Bank as "Jerusalem", Israel can chisel away at the Palestinians' territory.
The only way this stops is we
force them to stop. We force them to make peace. The US doesn't want to: it cannot face down its Jewish voters, who can make or break governments. But Europe doesn't have a Jewish lobby, nor do European Jews on the whole have the same relationship to Israel as Americans do (for reasons that should be quite obvious). The EU should take the lead. But it won't. The crisis in Palestine will still be playing out when we are all dead.
Countershit
You know the goddess of luck just plain hates you when this happens.
I wake up with 22 in the BB and call a minraise from the button. We are threehanded in a small sng. I am hoping for a raggy flop so that I can steal it from him when I check and he bets.
The flop comes 552, so I'm miles ahead and loving it. He bets, I call. No point scaring him off because whatever he has, he's not likely to catch up now.
The turn is another rag. He pushes. I call, of course, and he shows 66.
Now those of you who know a little poker will be expecting a routine bad beat here. He rivered a 6, right?
Of course not. I wouldn't be writing this post if the outcome had been that banal. He rivered a 5! Which counterfeited my boat and gave him a huge suckout.
Still, it's providing light relief from my ongoing nightmare with QQ in the five-dollars. I have won an allin with it precisely once in the last 60 games, and that was against a tiny stack. Apart from that, I've busted against K3 (called my PF push, rivered a K), AKs (rivered his flush), AJ (hit his ace), KJ (rivered trips), AK (on a raggy flop, he bet I pushed, he rivered his A), AJ (he pushed on a twosuited flop, he runner-runnered a onecard flush), AJ again (flopped his ace, then rivered the J for good measure). I'm thinking I need to openfold those biatches.
Aground
So when you've run aground, you need to try to refloat the boat. Sometimes when things are sufficiently bad, it's easier to start again, on a new footing, than to try to steer what you have to a goal that seems unattainable.
I want to save my marriage, so I proposed to Mrs Zen that we should begin again. I offered her a fresh sheet, a more positive outlook and a good-faith effort to look at her in the best light possible, without bringing the accreted hostility and animosity that bad times have grown. But of course you can't just keep sailing into the sand; you need the right direction. So I asked her to promise me things that represent the direction I want: that there should be no recriminations; that she should commit to returning to England; that she should respect my privacy and that she should make more effort to take responsibility (this is a woman who won't do any exercise because I won't go for walks with her, who won't diet unless I diet with her, who works as a bookkeeper but whose eyes glaze over if I try to discuss our finances with her). In other words, I asked her to be a grownup.
These things strike me as essential to a relationship. How can one work -- at least in the long term -- if you don't have them? You cannot live with someone who is constantly whining about what you did or didn't do (and I know that I've done it too, and I know it's destructive on my part). You cannot live with someone who just doesn't care that you are withering away in a place. You cannot live with someone who thinks they have a right to spy on you, to read your mail, to try to find out every small detail of your life (and not because they care about you, not because they want to add to your enjoyment of life by sharing your interests, but because they want still more to recriminate over). And you cannot live with an adult who insists on acting like a teenager (a bit of neediness, of course, is fine, as is a lack of interest in some areas of making a home, but trust me, it's impossible to deal with someone whose answer to every bad thing they do is that it was your fault in some way).
Mrs Zen was having none of it. She wants the recriminations. I think she actually likes them. So long as she feels she is the victim, she does not care that our marriage is fucked. All she cares about is that she does not feel responsible. I understand that committing to going to England means not seeing her parents much. I know that's a big thing (although the compensation for her is that she is much fonder of my sisters than she is of her own: my sister S was practically her best friend in the UK). She knows I will never come back here once I've left. I've tried to lessen the load of that by promising her that I will pay for her to come back in the summer holidays each year, and I have tried to paint a picture of a life that will be much more enjoyable for her. To my mind, you have to think about what's best for all in this circumstance. Can she handle living in the UK? Yes. She liked it there, more than she likes living here! But I can't handle living here. I am wondering whether the truth is that she doesn't want to lose her leverage over me. I cannot easily leave her because it is so untenable for me to live on my own here. It would be much easier there. But I'd be so much less likely to want to, and her too. Her commitment would buy effort on my part. It reads horribly clinically on the page, but that is how grownups have to negotiate their lives.
And of course she does not want to promise not to read my stuff. Mrs Zen has a model of marriage in which a couple lives happily together, entirely without secrets, satisfied with each other. Maybe she didn't notice before we got married that I am
unsatisfiable, restless, not wholly tamed. She feels that I went off the rails when she was pregnant with the twins. But I've never really been on them. I have never been that ordinary working Joe that is half her model marriage. And there's the rub. She wants me to promise her things too. But I am asking her to promise only things she is capable of. I am not demanding that she becomes a good housewife, an intellectual or any of the countless things I like in people but she doesn't have. I want her to try to be the best her that she can, not to aim for some ideal that she cannot reach. It's incredibly negative to judge someone against a standard they have no hope of meeting, or to hate them for not being what they cannot be. I used to be horribly bitter about my father until I realised that he had done what he could and I was hating him for not doing what he couldn't. She wants me to be a completely different person though, to promise what I can't deliver, what I would have no intention of delivering. She is saying that she wants convenient lies. She doesn't think she is; she thinks I actually could just become who I am not overnight. So she wants to read my mail to check whether I am writing to X or Y or anyone else she can readily identify as a woman. Whatever the quality of my relationship with anyone online, nearly all of my friends in this life have been women. What am I supposed to do, be eternally lonely because Mrs Zen is jealous, because she wants to have me all to herself (even though she is well aware that she is not interested in most things I'm interested in, so she cannot conceivably be enough for me. I know that she sees it as a huge failing of hers but I think that
anyone who has their every need met by one person is hopelessly shallow and uninteresting; I'm not able to see how that's
even possible).
So I am destined for divorce. It's a pity. I want to fix it in good faith but I can only work with what I have, and I have to accept that Mrs Zen is irredeemable. She simply does not want a working marriage. I was horrified by her reply (I wrote her an email because it's very hard to have a conversation with her about our relationship, because I will not be able to complete the first sentence before she heads it off into the weeds). I realised that she does not want peace; she wants war, so long as she is convinced that I am in the wrong. She wants bitterness, anger, upset. I understand. She feels she needs to get her head straight on all of that; I feel that we need to put it aside. Knowing how I am, I know that her way will not work. It will just drive the boat further up the beach and make it even harder to fix our marriage.
I don't look at the prospect with any joy. It won't be easy for me to maintain two households. I do not know how my children will fare with less money to support them, and more importantly, without me to take care of the things I take care of. I will have the choice of living extremely unhappily in a bedsit here or not seeing my children. (Please do not fill my comments with your ideas on how to make that choice, or how easy you think it is, or how you think I must just be exaggerating, because you don't have a fucking clue unless you live somewhere that you feel is as wrong as I feel Brisbane is for me. I wake up in the night almost in tears because I have been picturing myself living here for good, my days drearily passing until I am cremated and my ashes scattered in a memorial garden somewhere in Sunnybank or some such place. I do not claim it is rational, and others might truly love Brisbane, I don't say it's not possible, but it's how I feel
deeply about it. I have tried to be positive, tried to see the good, tried to find ways to make it more bearable. But here I am, in my basement, with the curtains always drawn so that Brisbane can't get in.) I know that it will not make me happy. I will simply be unhappy in a different way. But I have no hope at all of changing that if I stay as I am. My life is so static, so empty, that I find the black dog barks nearly all the time. I can't live like that.
I wanted to be writing about my happy marriage. I do not feel it is impossible. I am capable of loving Mrs Zen. I feel it would be much better for the children if we rescued ourselves. I do not want to be writing about how unhappy she is making me. But what can I do? It's a boat for two; one man cannot row it on his own.
I'm not a fan of
Christopher Hitchens, neocon pisshead and near talentless hack. Why? Because there is something ugly about liberals who become conservative when they make a few quid.
He also has an unhealthy love of authoritarians, as he shows in this interview:
With Giuliani, I also admire what he did in New York. He's proven that he can run and improve things by governing.
Well, yes, and Mussolini got the trains to run on time, don't you know.
He did provide me one laugh, by demonstrating his complete lack of self-awareness. He's recently written a book explaining why he hates religion. An interviewer asked had he never prayed:
Probably once for an erection, but not addressed to anyone in particular. Nor completely addressed to my cock.
I have just the thing for him:
raise flag, Chris.
Tub of mum
A friend of mine was telling me the other day that her young son has gone off the rails. He's not dealing drugs or stealing. No. It's much worse than that. He's into rap. Now if you want to hurt your mother, particularly if her politics are anything like progressive and her taste in music is indie lite, this is probably the way to go. One of her concerns in handling this nightmare is that the child will internalise any conflict, and his view of her will be soured by it. I say beat the little shit with a cane and let his psychiatrist sort it out in 20 years.
But the truth of it is that he will not be upset by her putting her foot down (say, by not allowing him to watch music TV). He will love her all the more for caring. Boys are like that. We strain and rebel against the love our mothers give us but we appreciate it all the same.
I had plenty of conflict with my mother when I was a boy. Sometimes it ended in my being clouted and sometimes in shouting on both sides. It didn't do me much harm and my enduring impression of my mother is more than favourable. When I think about how our lives were as children, and how my mother was, what I recall was how much she sacrificed for us, particularly given that she was by today's standards a very young mother. She spent her early twenties not pubbing and clubbing but bringing up three kids almost singlehanded. (Of course, that was her choice, but I don't think it was a particularly well-informed one.)
One of my oldest memories is of my mother and I walking the two miles from Helston to Porthleven, her pushing my sister's pram (or my pushchair; I'm hazy how old I was then, two or three) and me hanging on to the handle, the dog tied to the other. In my other hand I am holding a pot of mousse, still frozen, which I am eating, a poor man's ice-cream. The mousse is my treat, which I had every week without fail. We are walking because my mother has spent her last tuppence on it, rather than take the bus.
I don't eat tubs of mousse these days. But whenever I see them in the supermarket, I'm reminded of my mother. I do not know what she would think of her memorial's being a pot of fake-strawberry chemicals and milk but you do not get to choose how your children remember you. And I think that if you are a mother, unless you take a truly heinous path, you are destined to be loved, and rightly so.
Tub of mum
A friend of mine was telling me the other day that her young son has gone off the rails. He's not dealing drugs or stealing. No. It's much worse than that. He's into rap. Now if you want to hurt your mother, particularly if her politics are anything like progressive and her taste in music is indie lite, this is probably the way to go. One of her concerns in handling this nightmare is that the child will internalise any conflict, and his view of her will be soured by it. I say beat the little shit with a cane and let his psychiatrist sort it out in 20 years.
But the truth of it is that he will not be upset by her putting her foot down (say, by not allowing him to watch music TV). He will love her all the more for caring. Boys are like that. We strain and rebel against the love our mothers give us but we appreciate it all the same.
I had plenty of conflict with my mother when I was a boy. Sometimes it ended in my being clouted and sometimes in shouting on both sides. It didn't do me much harm and my enduring impression of my mother is more than favourable. When I think about how our lives were as children, and how my mother was, what I recall was how much she sacrificed for us, particularly given that she was by today's standards a very young mother. She spent her early twenties not pubbing and clubbing but bringing up three kids almost singlehanded. (Of course, that was her choice, but I don't think it was a particularly well-informed one.)
One of my oldest memories is of my mother and I walking the two miles from Helston to Porthleven, her pushing my sister's pram (or my pushchair; I'm hazy how old I was then, two or three) and me hanging on to the handle, the dog tied to the other. In my other hand I am holding a pot of mousse, still frozen, which I am eating, a poor man's ice-cream. The mousse is my treat, which I had every week without fail. We are walking because my mother has spent her last tuppence on it, rather than take the bus.
I don't eat tubs of mousse these days. But whenever I see them in the supermarket, I'm reminded of my mother. I do not know what she would think of her memorial's being a pot of fake-strawberry chemicals and milk but you do not get to choose how your children remember you. And I think that if you are a mother, unless you take a truly heinous path, you are destined to be loved, and rightly so.
So
we see elected another far-right pretend populist, whose first claim on winning the election is that he's a uniter, not a divider. The French working class have decided that having someone in power who hates
beurs as much as they do is fair recompense for the shafting they're going to get. It's to be hoped he has his sorry arse booted out before he can do too much damage to France's social system and hand too much of its wealth to the already rich. Why people vote for people who straight out despise them is a mystery to me. It never occurs to them as they find themselves struggling to make ends meet five years down the track that the reason their real wages have fallen, they can't get a doctor and their mortgage seems to be crushing them is that they elected a corporatist who made it his business to fuck them hard.
The first to congratulate Sarko were, of course, Blair and Bush. They recognise their own when they see it.
It's because I love you that I'm putting you in chains
My blog is a small outlet for me. It's my diary, my journal. It's private in a sense, because no one who knows me in "real life" reads it; only those who know me online. Or at least that is how I thought it was.
More than once, someone or other has said to me, your wife would be very unhappy if she read your blog. And I've always answered, or would have answered if I felt it was something worth bothering to answer, that if she cared about me she would already know what I felt and would not need to read it. And she should not be unhappy because I think that I do not reflect myself badly, and I do not paint such an ugly picture of her. (But of course, I know both that she would be unhappy and that she is because she has been reading it.)
She knows that it's private. It's understood between us that whatever I do online is my business and none of hers. Well, I say it is understood but of course, she broke that unspoken agreement by reading my emails. I didn't hide them. Why would I? I trusted her. And a relationship without privacy, without
space, is nothing. She doesn't understand or appreciate that point of view, but still, she knows that I aggressively defend the notion. I have never volunteered much information about what I do online. (I have told her I sometimes help make an encyclopaedia, but she wasn't interested enough to look at it; and I sometimes email her a review or a poem, whatever.) She isn't interested in it for its own sake, only because she wants to circumscribe what I might be permitted to do. She has always been jealous, and entirely unable to see that being jealous, and feeling she has a right to infringe on my private world, is a big part of why my private world is
so private. I am not indulging in woman blaming. I am not a saint, and don't claim to be one.
But it wasn't enough to read my emails, and continue to try to even when she knew that I considered it a breach of trust far worse than sleeping with another person. (Frankly, I would rather she had fucked every guy in our street than opened even one email. But I am not sexually jealous. I am jealous of my privacy.) This person, even though she does not care
who I am, does not want to know and never really has, focusing only on
who I'm not until I'm sick of hearing about it, doesn't want me to have any space that is my own.
I cannot hide this blog. She has the address, the name.
I never intended to hide it. But I had faith -- entirely misplaced -- that she would respect my need for her to allow me some private space. (I know it seems odd to suggest that a public journal is a private space but it is like having a friend who your wife does not share. She does not get to watch videos of what you and the friend do together, or hear tapes of what you say together. My blog is addressed to myself: it's me talking to me.) I cannot move it either. Even though I only have a small readership, I would hate to lose them by disappearing. The subterfuge involved would also be painful. Besides, if she was determined enough, she would find it, unless I used a fresh account and never used any of the names that I've used. So instead I must censor myself. I can no longer be honest, no longer enjoy the freedom to think out loud. If I want to do that, I have to do it and immediately delete it, so no one can read it. I have to swallow up my feelings, becoming more internalised, withdrawn, alienated. It is not just that I can't talk about things I don't want her to know; it is that I cannot talk at all. She was not willing to allow me to have my own speech to myself. She didn't want it for herself (she is only interested in finding the bad in it, after all, working out who I'm friendly with, and how friendly, so that she can become more and more upset by the very idea that there are people -- women even -- who don't think I'm totally shit).
It is like there is someone stealing the small piece of life I have that's mine, someone splashing mud into my little puddle. She has always wanted to smother me, to own me. In the past, it felt good, sometimes, because she expressed that by looking after me, by making me feel wanted. But when someone does not care for you, does not love you, but just wants you to be chained to them, that doesn't feel good at all. It doesn't feel like anything I want for myself. If I did not have children, this would be my farewell note to her. So I know she will read this and be thinking, but you wrote this, you wrote that, as though it made any difference what was actually in my blog, any more than it mattered what was in my emails. As though that would make it unfair that I am upset by her breaking what little compact we have between us. Because that is what she has done. Or at least what it feels like to me. Some people think that marriage is just a matter of two people being married. They believe there are a bunch of obligations that come with it and that's that. Mrs Zen feels just like that. I owe her a whole list of responsibilities because I am married to her. Well, I don't feel like that. I feel that our relationship, like any other, is a continuing negotiation. And no negotiations ever work well when one side tries to crowd the other and close down its options.
What does she hope to get out of it? It bemuses me. Does she not want me to love her, to care for her, to cherish her? How does stopping me from being able to talk to myself gain her that? It just makes me despise her. More almost than anything else she could have done.
