so anyway, i have decided to get divorced. i say decided, but it's more like a hopeless shrug of the shoulders. my life is unbearable. i mean, for fuck's sake, i am here, writing to myself on new year's eve, lonely, empty. but i don't feel that if i keep ploughing this furrow, that can change. i cannot live without the hope of change.
and i am not someone who just dies. i can't. i tried it on for size and i just didn't like it. and people say you should die for your kids, but this way, i can't.
you know. it's simple. i look at my life, where i live, the people i see day to day, and i think if this is my life, i'm dying right now. just fucking kill me. if that is what my life amounts to. if that is all i can hope for.
fuck that.
i need to feel i can live in Indonesia, or China, or on the Moon. i need to feel that this time next year i might not be an editor; i might be a published author, a poker champion, something. i need to feel that my life might yet start, that it hasn't somehow ended.
it's the way i feel inside and it's all because you lied
it's a cool, almost autumnal evening, which is odd, because it's pretty much midsummer. i am making a tape and the kids are out in the garden. they are bouncing on their trampoline and stuff, and there's a lot more screaming than there ought to be, but zenita is going through a screaming phase, so i try not to care unless it's a sound of pain.
and mrs zen was telling me that she was in contact with a, an old uni friend, on facebook. you what? i said. i didn't know you had facebook? and mrs zen is very much not the type. online is mostly a mystery to her, just a place where i meet women that she finds threatening. although actually, most of the time she thinks i'm meeting women, i'm reading about poker. endlessly reading about it, learning not a thing. i have promised myself to be systematic in the new year, to study to a plan.
new year. shit, isn't it? we don't do the things we ought to when we know we ought to. we just say tomorrow, and then one tomorrow we die.
so a is going to visit in february or something, and i'm glad, because we're not in touch, and i do like her. i used to have a huge crush on her. and it was kind of reciprocated, but you know how complicated life can make simple things, so we never fucked, and one night we were close enough but a jealous friend intercepted and it never happened. i am sad about that in a vague way. if i ever rise above vague in any sphere of my life, that will be good, but i'm not expecting it.
i'd still fuck her actually, in case you were wondering.
i know, you think i'd fuck anything, but i'm not sure that's true. i don't really enjoy it and i don't think i'm any good at it. the best a woman could do with me is straight out say, do this and do it like this.
so m comes round for christmas, for dinner and that, and we're talking, and i am saying to him that he doesn't sound like someone who loves queensland. he sounds like he is trying to convince himself that he does, but it's hollow.
he sort of agrees. and he's saying he could not go back to the north, because the people are just retards. and i say, well, i will hopefully talk you into coming to brighton with me.
the kids love him because i am a great judge of character and so are they. if you don't get on with my kids, there is just something wrong with you, because they're pretty good, all in all.
and i'm saying to mrs zen, i said to m that it would not be straight away, the day you say we are going, you are committed, i start thinking about it, but it will be maybe 18 months. and m was saying, that's a long time. and i was saying, yeah, but you don't just move a family of five just like that.
i do not feel trapped by responsibility. i am proud that i bear it like a man. i am proud that i chose to hurt myself by cutting into my freedom so that i can be sure i can keep them, feed them and allow them to have mostly what they want.
but i say to mrs zen that when i feel that she will never say we are going, she is committed, i will leave her. i will not live the rest of my life and die here.
i have been having pains in my chest. i'm pretty sure it's a muscle thing and nothing to be alarmed about. but it makes you think.
i want to climb maiden castle with naughtyman and look out over dorset, me and him, the wind in our hair.
and i was saying to m, a warm summer's day, wasps in the tree, in a walled beer garden, you cannot do that here, and he's saying, no, you can do that down south. and i'm thinking, dude, you can't, but i cannot think why not, i just know you can't.
and i know it's a bit confused in my head because it's mixed up with that afternoon in lyme regis, when i was having tea with my sister s, and i got a phone call about a job and the woman was almost apologetic about the pay and it was 10K more than the job i'd just lost.
so then we went fossilhunting, and i never loved s more than i did that day. but i have to say, i have always loved her, but with a love that is not escapable, not tradeable, almost not real.
so yesterday we phone them and i talk to s and her baby l. my heart is breaking because what the fuck am i doing here? and of course they have felt this way too. but i am me, not them, and what i feel means more.
how else are you supposed to think about the world? what you feel means more, right?
and i am not worried about my chest so much as i am worried about how dysfunctional i have been recently. i am completely off my feed, iykwim. it is like i have no view of myself, no regard for myself. a couple of years ago, i would play diplomacy obsessively but i was bad at it because i would write like a cunt instead of thinking about it. and now it's werewolf and i'm the same. it's like i'm so keen to do well that i can't help doing badly.
does that even make sense?
you know why i still want to fuck a? i want to still be me. i want to still be wanted, not to be this old, worn-out fucking idiot. i have no self-image, no idea of who i am. s used to say i had no proper boundaries, or some such psychological babbly bullshit, and she was right. but she was guessing, not showing insight, so i disregarded that shit.
i will not live the rest of my life and die here. i know i have to decide soon. my kids are playing in the room as i write this. how is that a decision i can even contemplate, let alone make?
i would have to leave them behind, allow them to become the people i despise, to allow mrs zen's family to mould them.
i do not feel like they are hers. they are mine. they are so much like me, mostly in the best ways. i look at naughtyman and he is such a gentle, beautiful little soul. and i never let him doubt that i love him. i do not think i could be faulted for tenderness. yeah, i make all the mistakes we all make. i shout and rage sometimes. i'm too tough, or too soft, or too unable to see what works. or whatever. but he cannot doubt i love him.
but if i walk away, what can he think but that i didn't care enough to stay?
they are so much like me, i know how easily they can be broken.
i don't have any good ideas. i have been cast adrift. i seem to be alone in a sea of morons. maybe i am wrong about them, but i don't know how to become right, when my sister s has a child and i have never seen it, and i have traded my chance to see her now for stability for my own kids and i don't even know what i'm saying except that i am drowning, already drowned, gone far away, and i left just this shell, a zombie who has to live and die and never think, because if i think, i just drown all over again.
and if you have any love for me, any at all, do not send me solutions. i do not need solutions. i need fortitude, and no one can grant you that, you find it within or you never have it. do not send me solutions. just return it to sender, forget i ever existed, let me die without a word.
so anyway, i've been indulging in flogging Ron Paul partisans up down and sideways in 2 plus 2's politics forum. this is a glorious waste of time, because they are mostly not very smart or very literate, but i miss bickering sometimes, so i like to get it out of my system. you can read the thread "Dr. Paul's chances" if you really want to see the clueless in action. i'm doing it entirely ex tempore but obv. it's no real challenge. you wouldn't support Paul if you weren't an idiot or an arsehole. or mostly both. and 2 plus 2, being the type of place it is, attracts a lot of both (poker attracts nerds and social outcasts, and disproportionate numbers of antiauthority types).
Ron Paul wants us all to live in 1770, but a mythical 1770 that he imagines would spring into being if we somehow rid ourselves of the accretions of the past couple of hundred years, including the government. however, i'm a statist precisely because i believe that governments can be forces for good, and that without them, we will be in 1770, which mostly sucked.
they are not, of course, entirely forces for good. but given the choice between the protective arm of the state and the fuckyoujackism of libertarianism, i'm choosing the guys who would at least make some small attempt to restrain the worst excesses of the rich and strong, instead of encouraging them to fuck the rest of us as ferociously as they can.
i'm quite sure that Paul does not believe that he is actually endorsing the ferocious fucking of the majority, but that is where his thinking leads. well, it probably wouldn't even get there. he'd destroy the economy so quickly, were he permitted to, that distinguishing who was fucked from who wasn't would be too difficult.
the nerds get excited about Paul's chances, but they are basically nil. the establishment will not permit him to win, even if he did have a chance. which he doesn't. he is certainly a unique candidate: unique in his lack of appeal to women, blacks, Hispanics, the poor in general and the wealthy too, who benefit too much from owning the government to want to disband it. it's only the moderately comfortable who think libertarianism is a good idea, because they hate taxes. the actual rich don't pay any, so they're all in favour of them, unless some goddamn pinko starts thinking that they should pay them.
look, a genuine populist would be a good idea for the States right now. don't get me wrong. (and i don't mean a centre-rightist like Obama, who fakes the populism because he thinks there's votes in it.) America's government is seriously skewed away from what people actually want, and what serves them, and a candidate who could right the ship a bit would be welcome. but some deranged fucktard who thinks that America should return to cartal money and refuse to talk to the rest of the world, while dismantling its entire governmental apparatus? no thanks.
and you know. here's a thing. a lot of Americans, when they discuss politics, will devolve into whining about the constitution. but America's constitution is not well suited to the modern day. it has the same flaws as a model as, say, the bible or the qur'an, and should be considered in much the same light: an interesting historical document, not a fucking roadmap. if it had been perfect, it would not have required so much amending, duh. Americans' insistence on referring present-day political questions back to the thoughts of 18th century landed gentry is amusing to the rest of us, who realise that the solutions to today's problems will be found today, not two hundred-odd years ago. mostly what people end in doing -- and guys, you even have a Supreme Court that makes it its business to do this -- is reading the bare sentences of the constitution like they were tealeaves, discerning meaning that can be applied to today's questions in answers that only barely resemble what you claim they do. Paul cherrypicks the constitution. he'll say, it guarantees life, and then say, so no abortions, ladies. (ignoring other provisions of the constitution that protect a person from state intrusion.) but the constitution did not say a thing about abortions, did not say whether foetuses are people and cannot be construed to have a position on this issue either way. (or can be construed to have one both ways.) so it's no use as a guide. and as i noted to the paultards, devolving decisions that affect personal rights to the individual states has not always had a good outcome. i fiercely oppose doing so, because i feel that minority interests can much more easily affect outcomes very adversely for other minorities in smaller polities, but tend to find it more difficult to construct large enough coalitions to wield power in bigger ones. which is pretty much why Paul and people like him favour states' rights on issues such as abortion. they realise that they cannot win that battle nationwide, because the population as a whole does not share their view, but they can win it in smaller localities where either the population supports them or they can simply ignore the majority's views because it is easier to control the decision-making apparatus.
doesn't my view intrude on personal liberty? you're damned right it does. i think personal liberty should be restrained. it's to the benefit of the weak that the strong find themselves constrained, as anyone who works 14 hours a day in a sweatshop will confirm for you.
and, of course, even most libertarians believe in restraints on personal liberty. they do not believe you should be allowed to shoot your neighbour for no reason. (they would allow you to shoot him if he trespassed, which i wouldn't, but they would at least bar you from shooting him on a whim.) they accept the notion that freedom cannot be absolute. well, after that, we are just bickering over where we place the bar, aren't we?
curiously enough, i'm a small-l libertarian. i believe the state should protect us from others, but not from ourselves, basically. i strongly oppose "morality laws", such as the prohibition on narcotics. i also oppose seatbelt laws and i could be convinced on compulsory vaccination (although there's the point to be overcome that if vaccination is not mandatory, it is close to pointless). i generally prefer education to restriction where possible, but i prefer restriction to unfettered hurting where it isn't. i don't believe that liberalism or progressiveness, whatever you want to call it, is opposed to libertarianism. far from it. i believe that they are bedfellows. but i suppose the difference is that most liberals separate the private and public spheres. just as you can call a man a liar in a conversation with your wife, but cannot do so with impunity in the public square, i feel it is right to be liberal with the private and restrain the public. think nudity and you quickly understand how i draw the line.
this is probably why liberals hate libertarians so passionately. we see them in some ways as our dark cousins. we allow our care for others to guide our political philosophy (sometimes to too great an extent, i'll grant you); they allow common human greed to. but greed is not good. you can argue all you like that it creates wealth, and we would have less if we weren't greedy (let's not even begin on the discussion of whether having less would not actually be better), but we don't have to incentivise ourselves with money and goods. (money is in any case only an expression of obligation--we could easily find other ways to express that, or to show our understanding of status and appreciation of those who have acquired it through means that benefit us all: we do not have to keep score with money.) we could even try love. what a glorious idea that a "high net worth" individual could be not one who has tons of moolah acquired by exploiting others who were less fortunate but one who made others happy. (part of the reason i dislike libertarians is that they insist that they do not hate other people, but want us all to be free and equal so we can all become rich together, yet are diehard capitalists, while ignoring that richness is a measure, not just an outcome, of disparity, created largely by exploitation, and that without restraint, ordering or wider cooperation, parity is impossible. once we do not have a level playing field, equity is harder and harder to achieve without broader authority. the bigger fish keep eating the smaller without a fishkeeper to prevent them from doing it.)
and if you don't think 1770 sucked, try a Rawlsian thought experiment. you're a field nigger in Georgia. still love the good old days?
so anyway, i was thinking about the Polynesians, and how they never reached the Americas. (doubtless it's not very interesting but i was thinking about it because i got a book from the library -- first time i've been there in nearly a year, because of fines etc -- about Indonesian, and i tell you what, what you can learn from the most unlikely sources: did you know that the Malay urheimat is in Sumatra? no? me either. and although i knew that the Austronesian language family originated in Taiwan -- and Taiwan's aborigines still speak Austronesian languages -- i had always thought they had spread down through southeast Asia and out through Indonesia into the Pacific. wrong. they actually jumped from Taiwan to the Philippines, which are a lot closer to Taiwan than i had thought, and then down into Indonesia, from there west to Malaysia and up into southeast and east into the Pacific.)
and it occurred to me that when they sailed, they must have taken supplies for when they landed, but also supplies for the journey. but those supplies must have been half for going out, half for coming back. because they had no idea what was out there. how often must they have sailed out from wherever, missed land and come back? was it an occasion of shame or something they often did? i wonder how long they sailed for? how much food can you carry in a canoe? i guess you could fish some: did they count on that? i have no idea how many fish there are in the open ocean.
or did they know? did they watch birds and guess? might they have followed flocks of birds out into the ocean? birds must find land, right? did pioneers set out, find land, then come back and tell people what they had found?
whatever they did, i do not believe they were wayfarers who were blown off course. obv. they sailed on purpose, one way or another. they weren't idiots. dreamers maybe. not idiots.
i'll have more to say about this at a later date, but for now, that's it.
so anyway, i was thinking about the Polynesians, and how they never reached the Americas. (doubtless it's not very interesting but i was thinking about it because i got a book from the library -- first time i've been there in nearly a year, because of fines etc -- about Indonesian, and i tell you what, what you can learn from the most unlikely sources: did you know that the Malay urheimat is in Sumatra? no? me either. and although i knew that the Austronesian language family originated in Taiwan -- and Taiwan's aborigines still speak Austronesian languages -- i had always thought they had spread down through southeast Asia and out through Indonesia into the Pacific. wrong. they actually jumped from Taiwan to the Philippines, which are a lot closer to Taiwan than i had thought, and then down into Indonesia, from there west to Malaysia and up into southeast and east into the Pacific.)
and it occurred to me that when they sailed, they must have taken supplies for when they landed, but also supplies for the journey. but those supplies must have been half for going out, half for coming back. because they had no idea what was out there. how often must they have sailed out from wherever, missed land and come back? was it an occasion of shame or something they often did? i wonder how long they sailed for? how much food can you carry in a canoe? i guess you could fish some: did they count on that? i have no idea how many fish there are in the open ocean.
or did they know? did they watch birds and guess? might they have followed flocks of birds out into the ocean? birds must find land, right? did pioneers set out, find land, then come back and tell people what they had found?
whatever they did, i do not believe they were wayfarers who were blown off course. obv. they sailed on purpose, one way or another. they weren't idiots. dreamers maybe. not idiots.
i'll have more to say about this at a later date, but for now, that's it.
so anyway, i know sometimes you feel as though you are worthless, because you are small but the world is so big.
but you are not. it takes us to make the world what it is. it takes mothers, brothers, sisters, and it takes fathers.
it takes love, and i won't believe the fools who say it doesn't.
and i know, sometimes, we are scared because we want to touch each other so much, and we are afraid that we will not, that we will brush up against another and they will not even know we have been there.
so i often feel that but i refuse to believe i am nothing. i refuse to believe the people i love are nothing.
when it comes down to it, i refuse to believe you are nothing too. it seems to me simply fated that you are big or small, a mover or moved. it is nothing to do with you. you are just a clutch of atoms with ideas above its station.
it takes love.
you know what, if you don't have a child, you do not know how it feels to touch your sleeping child on its face, and feel for a moment that the whole world has become your backdrop. the love you have, enormous, untamed, radiant, flows from you to the child. you can feel it coursing through your hands.
they tell you it is not real, but wait till they too touch their sleeping child.
if you don't have a child, i pity you. i shouldn't, i know, but man, what you're missing!
you have never loved anyone like this.
tonight i was talking to zenella about going back to England to see L, her cousin. zenella is for it, a hundred per cent. but when i say, maybe we should all just move back there, i have to be clear i mean everyone, her brother and sister too. and she says, you need to work really hard, daddy, so that you have thousands and millions of dollars and you can fly all my friends and their families to England too.
to believe you can shape your world just by wanting it so!
if you cannot touch another person and believe truly that you love them, i pity. i shouldn't, i know, but
but what's wrong with you?
okay, people who do not have kids, you can stop reading. next paragraph is just for us who do.
you know the biggest thing that happened to me? one of my kids was talking to me, saying daddy this, daddy that, and i suddenly realised, wow, i am the man i adored when i was a child. i mean, i am walking in his shoes. i feel unprepared, untutored, but time doesn't wait for you to catch up. you are daddy, right now, and finally you feel sympathy for the guy who stuffed up before you.
so anyway, i know sometimes you feel as though you are worthless, because you are small but the world is so big.
but you are not. it takes us to make the world what it is. it takes mothers, brothers, sisters, and it takes fathers.
it takes love, and i won't believe the fools who say it doesn't.
and i know, sometimes, we are scared because we want to touch each other so much, and we are afraid that we will not, that we will brush up against another and they will not even know we have been there.
so i often feel that but i refuse to believe i am nothing. i refuse to believe the people i love are nothing.
when it comes down to it, i refuse to believe you are nothing too. it seems to me simply fated that you are big or small, a mover or moved. it is nothing to do with you. you are just a clutch of atoms with ideas above its station.
it takes love.
you know what, if you don't have a child, you do not know how it feels to touch your sleeping child on its face, and feel for a moment that the whole world has become your backdrop. the love you have, enormous, untamed, radiant, flows from you to the child. you can feel it coursing through your hands.
they tell you it is not real, but wait till they too touch their sleeping child.
if you don't have a child, i pity you. i shouldn't, i know, but man, what you're missing!
you have never loved anyone like this.
tonight i was talking to zenella about going back to England to see L, her cousin. zenella is for it, a hundred per cent. but when i say, maybe we should all just move back there, i have to be clear i mean everyone, her brother and sister too. and she says, you need to work really hard, daddy, so that you have thousands and millions of dollars and you can fly all my friends and their families to England too.
to believe you can shape your world just by wanting it so!
if you cannot touch another person and believe truly that you love them, i pity. i shouldn't, i know, but
but what the fuck's wrong with you?
okay, people who do not have kids, you can stop reading. next paragraph is just for us who do.
you know the biggest thing that happened to me? one of my kids was talking to me, saying daddy this, daddy that, and i suddenly realised, fuck, i am the man i adored when i was a child. i mean, i am walking in his shoes. i feel unprepared, untutored, but time doesn't wait for you to catch up. you are daddy, right now, and finally you feel sympathy for the guy who fucked up before you.
so anyway, regular viewers may remember that i liked the first Burial album, which was really very good. and it was hard to imagine that Burial could improve on that.
hard to imagine but it happened.
it feels exactly like a drizzly night in Streatham. you are walking home with a broken heart. you've finally realised that it's never going to happen with her, and you've never felt worse. echoing in your head are snippets of r&b that make sense now because finally you are feeling what they were singing.
the rhythmic scheme is similar to that of Burial--so much so that in parts he might have used the same drum tracks, but the feel has moved on. the compositions are much stronger, full of inventive use of samples and cutting-edge sound, and the melodies are just dripping off it. i swear, i spent the whole of my first listen going "this cannot be this fucking good" and my second going "oh yes it can". it's astonishingly progressive, deep, brutal, tender, disorienting and moving in so many ways that i can't find decent words to describe it with.
so anyway, this is quite typical of the ill-informed rubbish people are writing about the subprime crisis.
the bare bones of it are easy to understand. this is how an RMBS works:
Lender A has 1000 mortgages. You can expect x amount of money over the period of those mortgages. you can also expect some number of the mortgages not to be paid. people lose their jobs, get sick, get caught by rapidly increasing interest rates. this is the credit risk of the mortgages.
Lender A is only allowed to keep so much risk on its balance sheet. it's the deal between banks and the rest of us: they do not have to have enough money to pay everything they owe, but can only hold the potential to lose this much and no more. the rules were fixed by the Basel Accord.
but every loan Lender A can make increases the benefit flowing to it. so the question is, how can it make the lovely money from loans without taking on more risk than it is permitted? the answer is securitisation.
this is what Lender A does. it sells the loans to a special trust (they have various names, including structured investment vehicles and special-purpose entities). Lender A therefore gains benefit for having made the loans--and unless it provides credit support, its interest in the loans is now over. the money the borrowers pay goes to the SIV (it owns the loans). but how does the SIV pay for them? it has no money of its own, even though it will get all the cashflow from the loans. well, the SIV sells the cashflows from the loans to investors. in effect, it borrows the capital to pay Lender A from the investors, and gives them promissory notes in exchange.
these notes are a very good deal for investors, generally, and are not especially risky for them. this is because they are carefully structured, with well-chosen loans that have carefully figured default scenarios based on historical records (basically, if you have had 10,000 similar loans and only a couple of hundred went bust, you can draw a normal distribution and say that at worst, y loans will go bust with 95% confidence) and have "credit enhancements", which are mechanisms to prop up the notes if loans go bad (such things as having more than enough loans to pay the notes down -- overcollateralising, and having insurance for the top tranche). the most notable structural enhancement is usually that the notes have more than one level, or tranche. the A tranche will generally be rated AAA; the B tranche generally A. the B tranche carries much more of the risk, and goes bust first, giving support to the A tranche. the notes pay interest from the cashflows from the loans, and pay the principal back on the expiry of the note, if there's enough money.
so what went wrong in the subprime crisis? basically, when RMBS are composed of "prime" loans (loans to people with excellent credit histories and good jobs), they are very sound investments, but do not make you much money (because the borrowers are not charged high interest rates). the A tranche of a prime-loan RMBS is a very safe investment, probably suitable for Granny's pension fund (which would generally only invest in government bonds). but some lenders made loans to people who did not have good credit histories and did not have good jobs. these loans are called "subprime". from a risk-analysis point of view, the most significant difference between these types of loan is that if you make default scenarios for prime loans, you can be fairly sure they will be accurate in most financial conditions. sure, lots of people will default if there's a recession, but you can model that and allow enough room in your model for significant defaults (overcollateralising by sufficient loans that even if the worst happens, you still have enough paying loans to pay the interest on the notes). however, subprime loans are more unpredictable. so the risk is harder to quantify.
but lender A wants those loans off its balance sheet. they are very risky (although very lucrative). so it makes the RMBS out of them very attractive to borrowers. it can do this because the interest rate a note pays is a function of the interest rate the borrower pays on the loan. if you're paying 7 per cent and the note is paying 6.5 per cent, that works. (in case you're interested, the interest on the loans will be the central bank rate plus a margin, which I think is usually 2 per cent; and the interest rate on the notes is generally the interbank rate, which is similar to the central bank rate, plus a margin that is usually a percentage point or similar--and usually the SIV has a deal with a third party to take on the risk that the interest rates become very different). subprime borrowers pay very much higher interest rates than do prime borrowers, so subprime notes have much higher interest rates too.
the crisis has occurred because a/ banks bought tons of the subprime RMBS because their risk/return ratio seemed very acceptable (they pay luscious interest rates for what was sold as reasonable risk--remember, they are only allowed so much risk, and if they can make more from it, all the better) and b/ many more loans defaulted than the models suggested would. it's key to understanding this that you grasp that everyone involved relied on Lender A telling the truth about its borrowers. no one else gets to see the raw figures. i doubt anyone did anything downright fraudulent, but certainly massaging the figures would happen.
so back in the summer (or winter, here), people started realising that they were holding bad paper. the default rates for subprime lenders had risen, and investors realised that they were holding much more risky investments than they had thought. so they wanted to sell, fast. the price of subprime RMBS on the market fell.
so why is there a "credit crunch"? because no one knows who is holding how much of this shit! but everyone knows that banks are holding a lot of it. they treated the AAA tranches of RMBS as though they were Treasuries, which they are not (Treasuries are effectively risk free--if you cannot trust the US to repay its debts, who can you trust?). so banks are refusing to lend each other money, because they don't know how risky it is. this is quite astonishing. we are saying that, say, Citibank will not lend HSBC money because it is uncertain that it will be paid back. this notion was exacerbated by the collapse of Northern Rock, a previously sound bank.
***
so what does Keegan have wrong? i'll give just a flavour of how bad his article is:
banking operations, via such wonderfully opaque financial 'instruments' as collateralised debt obligations (CDOs) and structured investment vehicles (SIVs), became increasingly untransparent.
opaque must be a synonym for "i can't understand them" because CDOs and SIVs are perfectly transparent if you know what you're looking at. (in a CDO, you might have a pool of, say, car loans, which pay the interest on notes in the same way as the mortgages in an RMBS.) the problem is not that they are not transparent but that they are difficult to "look through". you cannot be sure that the risk you are supposed to be taking on fairly reflects the risk that the underlying obligations carry.
SIVs sound like real vehicles. Unfortunately, they don't seem to work very well.
this simply isn't true. they work extremely well for the purpose they were invented. they very effectively transfer risk from the lender to the investor. this is not the problem with them at all.
Similarly, it is not much good if bank balance sheets look wonderful but there is insufficient liquidity in the system.
this is just plain meaningless. he is confusing two things: a/ improving your balance sheet by transferring loans off it and b/ improving it by investing in bonds that seem to offer good risk/return ratios. the first thing is not affected by the subprime crisis: it remains good business for banks to create RMBS. the second is affected: people are now unsure whether banks really do have the financial positions they claim to.
Things were not helped by what people saw when they were forced to put those 'off balance sheet' items back on the balance sheet.
this is plain ridiculous. no one has to put the loans back on their balance sheet. nothing can make them. they no longer own them. the investors do, in effect. the subprime crisis does not affect lenders in this sense unless they rely on RMBSs to provide them with capital for their operations (as Northern Rock does).
Banks and building societies like to know with whom they are dealing. I say 'like', but of course should say 'liked'. In the world of securitisation and the 'parcelling out' of risk, trust and intimate knowledge of what things were worth and who was holding them became old hat.
this is total nonsense. banks have to be able to quantify risk. that is all. it goes no deeper than that. you can call it "trust" if you like, but the truth is that they trust the money, not the person. if you pay, and keep paying, they "trust" you. if they think you'll keep paying, they "trust" you. if they think you might not, they don't. that's all.
So what about the impact of all this on the real economy? Nobody really knows.
no, they don't, but mostly the range of possibilities goes from bad to worse, particularly given the bursting of the housing bubble in the States.
so anyway, because i hate to have to pity people who are at least passably intelligent and should know better, i am going to give relief to Don.
Don, here is a link to a good jumping-off point for you to inform yourself about global warming. if after using this resource, you prefer to remain clueless, that is your problem. do not plague me with it because i really don't have much tolerance for people who actively prefer lies to the truth.
more particularly, for easy reference, this should answer your questions. try to have an open mind. you are plain wrong on this subject, truly. practically no one involved on the science side has anything to gain from this, not even jobs or research money, whatever your views on President Gore.
so anyway, are Americans actually insane? George Monbiot is a partisan, true, but he's on the side of teh good. this should be a clarion call to people of goodwill. it is full of science and shit. i know Americans hate that stuff, but the rest of us have to WAKE THE FUCK UP.
American rightists deny this is happening because they are selfish, self-absorbed cunts. but are they actually insane?
i'm beginning to think they must be. these people are seriously considering as their leader a man who believes the earth is 6000 years old. this is the man they think should lead them as they face the challenges of what will be particularly difficult years, as it dawns on even the dimmest of us that yes, the world is warming, and yes, it will have bad outcomes for many of us, and yes, we are on the downslope of oil production (you fucktards just haven't noticed that the price of oil never did get back down to $40 and guys, it never will -- you have been lied to, over and over, and you didn't have the sense to check it out for yourself), and no one is putting any money into alternatives. Shell just closed down its solar projects, and is concentrating on tar sands.
we pursued money over happiness, and we're not happy, and our riches will be worth nothing when this world burns.
their other choice is a man who fervently believes a cosmic zombie who died to redeem us for being naughty consorted with the American Indians for no particular good reason. i'd sooner elect someone who thought Lord of the Rings was history. for fuck's sake.
and dude, don't start me. Ron Paul Love? WTF? WTF WTF WTF?? the guy's an apostle of hate, an icon of selfishness, greed, self-obsessedness. he's the cunt's cunt. Ron Paul LOVE??? you people are fucking demented, no question.
and it's not just Americans. look at these lunatics.
'Evolution has falsely become the foundation of our society and we need the television studio to advocate Genesis across this land in order to remove this falsehood, which presently is destroying the church foundation.'
OMFG.
look, just in case you're not clear, science tries to figure out the truth about the world. it doesn't take a stance on what the truth is. it doesn't want to destroy religion, Richard Dawkins notwithstanding. it just wants to look at the world and be able to say this is what it is.
it is not contestable that evolution happens. it is not contestable that the world has warmed because of anthropogenic forcing. these things are true, and you can count on it, in a way you cannot count on much in this world. both are, roughly, 99 per cent true. and these fucktards are playing in the margin, the one per cent of uncertainty.
and you know what, your god's in there too. he's in the one per cent. it's a fucking ridiculous fairy story but we can't prove, and never will be able to prove it. there will never be a time machine (bank that--it's just not going to happen ever) and we will never be able to prove it with archaeology or any other means. and dude, he's not going to talk to us, or anything like that, because he doesn't exist.
and "evolution has become the foundation of our society" is code. you know what it's code for? it means "rationalism is teh bad; bring back the dark ages". it means "fuck the truth, i want my fairy story".
fuck the truth. that's what you one percenters are all about. fucking the truth and damning the consequences. and we have to wear it, because some very greedy men and women are enabled by you idiots, and we are too scattered, too powerless, to stop them from not just fucking the truth, but fucking the rest of us too.
but i say, this life is meaningless, stupid and ridiculous. i say that the only way it gains any meaning is if we only accept the truth. we take the truth, whether we like it or not, and we make that the only thing we worship. it won't do us an ounce of good, no, but at least we won't be confusing ourselves that anything does.
btw, while we're on the subject of the American election, it should be obligatory for candidates to have done coke, you fucking wowsers. how can you trust a person to be your leader if he has never even done a toot? and you know, if you'd pass up a guy who's been about a bit in favour of a guy who thinks that FairTax would work, you really are insane, the lot of you.
so anyway, you are standing in the middle of the road and a truck is coming. you need to get out of the way. you are fucked if you don't. you have the sense to step aside, right? Wrong.
okay, so i'm making a mixtape for the car, one side sorta stoner music, one side sorta rocky, so who knows how that will turn out. anyway, i'll talk about it a bit while i'm taping it.
i kick off side one with do the whirlwind by Architecture in Helsinki, one of the best, if not the best, current Australian band. i don't know how you would describe their music. quirky pop, a gangshow on acid, kitchensink-included melange. all of that and great tunes. do the whirlwind is reminiscent of the tom tom club, which older viewers may remember was a Talking Heads spinoff that made leftfield, mildly funky pop. boppy is the best word for it.
more strictly stoner music is the beta band, who sound like i feel after three or four pipefuls. i know is particularly bonged out. like many beta tracks, a fragile melody staggers along and some guy or other mutters without sounding too interested. gotta love that when you're fucked up.
more ecstatic, and my current favourite song, is hyper-ballad by Bjork. if you don't know it (and if you don't, why the fuck not? this is a masterpiece of one of our day's great talents. please, do yourself a huge favour and get into her. she has a truly special voice and is a pioneer in IDM; either aspect would make her worth getting to know -- both puts her in a league of her own), it starts gently, with a hint of a melody, and grows to become a belting dance number. if the world was not stuffed full of fuckwits, this would have been number one for a hundred weeks.
Broken Social Scene is a Canadian supergroup. yeah, i know, that's like being the ski-ing champion of Nigeria, but as it happens, Canada is very much in the forefront of rock at the moment. Arcade Fire lead the sales, but Godspeed! You Black Emperor are the artistic pinnacle for me. some members of GYBE are involved in Broken Social Scene, but Kevin Drew and Brendan Canning are very much the creative force. anthems for a seventeen-year-old girl is the track i chose, and it's one of the standouts on the brilliant you forgot in people. and i mean brilliant. if you have any love for pop at all, you should own this album. it is that good. you just will not hear better songs than lover's spit or cause=time, i guarantee it.
you cannot think dope music without thinking Caribou. Dan Snaith's andorra is the most trippy album made since 1969. if you didn't know better, you'd think it was made in '69 (but with more, erm, synthesisers and shit). his earlier work was what you might call folkatronica -- the brand of IDM that has a folk element, usually more in its general feel than in any reliance on folk song structures, although i think you could consider Tunng to be folkatronica if you pushed it. Four Tet would be very much the kind of thing we're thinking of here: it's not folk, but you it has the organic, rootsy feel of it. anyway, irene is a great track. at first, you think you are going to get bouncy electropop, but then the drugs kick in and you get a psychedelic masterpiece, which spins and whirls its way into a static wash.
when i've been smoking, i like intricate, difficult to follow music, because having something to unravel makes good use of the better focus you can have when you're stoned. but also i like simple, raw emotion (like hyper-ballad, for instance). severance by Dead Can Dance brings the huge power of Brendan Perry's voice into full effect. it's the kind of gloomy, marvellous bullshit that I loved when I was a late teen, and frankly still love. it really helps that it has a wonderful melody too.
after the gloom, and given that atmosphere is yet to come, i thought something bouncy might be fun. so it's Feist's 1234. this is being used here for ipod ads, so you hear it a lot on tv, but it just doesn't get tired. there isn't much to say about it (and i already blogged a review of her album, the reminder (i hesitate to link that because i've changed my view on volta somewhat--repeated listens to great songs like wanderlust have allowed the intricate melodies that were hidden on first listen to be revealed): it's just topnotch bouncy pop.
when i was a kid at school, i had a friend called h. he was a decent musician, which i've never been, and more importantly, he was into alternative music in a big way. one day in school, i saw him drawing notation on paper. not musical notation, more like a graphical representation of music, much like you'd see in cubase or a sequencer of that type. it was atmosphere, and it made me curious to know what it sounded like. so i bought the record and bang, i fell in love. that love, unlike so many others, has not diminished, not when the band, Joy Division, became New Order, not even when New Order made a duff record (which i have now forced myself to love). and what did i think about atmosphere when i got to hear it? it made me weak at the knees. there is something about Joy Division, an ability to reach inside you, touch something deep in your core, ring a note that resounds in the darkest, trembling part of you. i'll tell you a secret. i've always liked nice people. i like bubbly, outgoing people, if i feel they're genuine. if i feel they're bunging it on, not so much. mrs zen was a nice person, sweet and gentle. our relationship broke down when she had kids and stopped being nice. but in music nice is nearly always faked. and uninteresting, mostly. nice you can feel warm about, but let's face it, you need dark to become deeply engaged. and atmosphere has a glacial beauty that nice, however good it can get, cannot hope to produce.
after the depth of atmosphere, you really bounce. no, you do. so it's MIA's Bollywood cover, jimmy. it's just good clean fun with a dash of garam masala. you know you like the sound of that, sucka.
so let's see. we've had folkatronica, and we've had icelandic. so let's have icelandic folkatronica. that's mum, more so on their latest album than on the previous three. the IDM stylings of their earlier work have largely give way to a more organic pop sound. it hasn't been universally well received, but the latest album come on feel the poison ivy, or whatever the fuck it's called (please no letters to the editor. if i really cared what it's called, i'd read the front cover of the cd.) is pretty decent. the eerieness has been toned down and the sound is much more strumalong. i think that you end up with a tradeoff. they are never going to hit the heights of the best stuff on earlier albums (green grass of tunnel or don't be afraid... come to mind) but the new album is not chockers with dreary "experimental" filler. we smoked frogs til they exploded is bouncy and fun, with a bit more than the average pop song going on. i don't think it has any claim to greatness, but i'm not kicking it to the kerb either.
we can argue all night about who is good, who is great, but what we will not dispute is the best rock band of the past twenty years. not just the band who revived the flat-out dead genre of rock, but a great live rocknroll band -- the best i've seen by so far it's not funny, a band who went off, becoming incandescent, furious, psychotic. the pixies obv. i remember buying surfer rosa without ever having heard a note of them, on the strength of a review in the nme by someone whose taste i knew i shared. he said, must buy, so i must bought. omfg. for this tape, i chose hey, a stripped-back blues that allows black francis to throw out that incredible energy that made him a rock god. i think it's close to his finest three minutes. i've never analysed the song or tried to work out what it means, or anything like that. it's one of those works you just let be.
i wrapped it up with ace of babylon by shitmat. killababylonkutz, the album, sees shitmat take a quote from babylon bwoy, a bogstandard ragga joint, and bend it, warp it, mince it alongside different mashups. one features the mastermind theme music; another the Jacksons. the leadoff track, in which Babylon Bwoy meets Ace of Bass, is pure class. although you don't half get weird looks when you break out in a "Babylon Bwoooooy" in the fruit section at Coles.
so for the other side of the tape, i went for rock of one type or another. i think the Arctic Monkeys need a better internal editor, because both albums have featured great songs amid some very ordinary dross (i feel the hot reviews have been reactions to the really good stuff, and have glossed over the filler). a certain romance is a feature on the first album, a hymn to the chavs, of sorts. this is the sort of thing that can only be english: we would all recognise what he is singing about. here, people would not get the nuance. chavs are not bogans, the aussie equivalent, and this is why. someone like me, a working-class boy with materially very little, is there but for the grace of god a chav. they are people like me who lacked whatever and took another path. but a bogan is someone you just would never be. aussies feel that bogans are different from them. but although the english working class looks down on chavs, it also knows that they are themselves a few failed exams from chavitude.
steve albini is these days better known as a producer than a musician. you will have heard his production, even if you didn't know it was him. among others, surfer rosa and in utero.
unfortunately at this point i became so stoned that i couldn't write any more. just in case anyone is in the slightest interested, the rest of the tape was:
colombian necktie bleeding heart lloyd, i'm ready to be heartbroken a hundred years pace is the trick sunspots ceremony On a plain saeglothur
and yeah, it's fucking good but i'm bored of writing about it.
so anyway, i've been thinking about Satan. not a religious conversion type thing, don't worry. but thinking about the concept and how it works. there's a great post in that, but this won't be it. sometimes i think about things and they stew instead of brew, iykwim. this will be a pot pourri, rather than a well-rounded essay.
i began thinking about Satan a while back, when i was reading something about muslim philosophers. they struggled with the concept that a transcendental god could create a universe that is made of matter and governed by time. how could Allah interact with matter? it's fairly abstruse but i think it's a reasonable question for a theologian.
the same question struck the gnostics, but from a slightly different angle. the question they had was how could a god that is good create evil? this is a recurrent question in christian theology. their solution was that god did not create the world at all, but employed a demiurge to do it. i think their notion that the demiurge must be evil is not just wrong, but uninteresting. people who can only see things in polarities are unlikely to stumble on insights, if only because the world is not on the whole polar. there are ways in which it is, of course -- handedness in molecules comes to mind (although my understanding is that they are not evenly two-handed, and that chirality is not oppositional) -- but seeing it that way limits your understanding, particularly when considering more complex elements of the world, such as human behaviour. concepts such as good and evil are not ultimately useful in thinking about what people do, and why they do it, because their motives are rarely unitary, and indeed can be seen in different ways from different perspectives. for instance, you may do what you think is necessary, and i may fail to see the need. does that mean you are evil because from my perspective what you do is bad? maybe so, because evil is a value judgement as much as a description.
but whatever the reason for believing that a transcendental god could not or would not do the "dirty work" of creation, we can allow that it's plausible that he did not, and also plausible that he willed into being something that could or would. so i don't think it's difficult to imagine that Satan created the world.
but i also think that it's not necessary to see Satan as evil. he can equally well be considered to be disappointed. imagine. he (it, realistically; it's a bit weird to think of angels, or any other semigod, as gendered) is practically a god. he has awesome powers, and has used them to make a world that is not just intricate, but is fascinating, wonderful, in some ways deep. (when we say world, i think we are saying universe in this case, because surely god did not make anything material in this scenario. but i am perfectly happy to agree that Satan made only the earth, and other demiurges, angels, whatever, made the rest of the material universe. god, after all, does not have to be limited in how many angels he can make.) Satan, by any measure, did a good job. but he doesn't get the credit. god insists that he doesn't. when man comes to be, he praises god, not Satan. indeed, he does not even reocgnise Satan when he presents himself. worse, although Satan has been granted dominion over the earth, he does not get to rule over men's souls. we mean by this only the deeper part of them (if such exists; we are not passing judgement on the ideas, just thinking them through). when men feel there is something more, something greater, Satan is affronted. the ingratitude stings. Satan feels he should be praised, worshipped even, yet men want more. so not only does he not get credit for his work, it is implicitly criticised.
the concept of Satan is rooted in its originators being nomads, or at least pastoralists who were making the (long) transition from a nomadic to a settled life. the theme that nomadic life is superior to settled life is presented strongly in the bible, even into the new testament. the clash between the modes of existence is most famously allegorised in the story of cain and abel. here a shepherd conflicts with an agriculturalist, and the shepherd is strongly favoured. (it's interesting that priests are conceptualised as shepherds, not judges or cultivators, which are symbols of settled life.) god himself can be seen to favour nomads. his chosen people are wanderers who usurp the settled Canaanites. it's not coincidental, surely, that the most prominent city that the Jews overwhelm is Jericho -- possibly the world's first.
but it isn't just in the old testament. Jesus is too a nomad. he urges his followers to give up all their goods and follow him. he is an itinerant and encourages others to become itinerants with him. his forty days are spent in the wilderness, not contemplating things in a settled place. he takes a journey into the wilderness. i find the forty days an incredibly interesting part of the Jesus story. it doesn't really fit with most conceptions of Jesus. I'll explain what i mean.
what is Jesus? it's a serious question. is he a man with intimations of godhood or is he god in human form? i am talking in an abstract sense, not asking what your personal conception of Jesus is (i know that anthony, for instance, will have a readymade answer here, which he will find incredibly difficult to defend because it is dogma, not reasoned; if i have him wrong, i apologise, but i find most of his notions of religion to be dogmatic, which is not intended as an insult, rather than outcomes of reflection -- i don't expect most religious people think their faith through; they either accept or don't accept, and they will tend to believe it in toto, not pick and choose; after all, they did not work it all out for themselves!). people have struggled with this question. indeed, it was a major source of conflict in the byzantine world: people actually fought in the streets basically over whether Jesus had two natures, human and divine, or just the one. (of course, this was the pretext for conflicts over resources, power and so on, rather than something people on the whole believed was worth fighting over -- or at least something that people could be swayed into fighting over by other guys who didn't care how many natures Jesus had.)
in the wilderness story, Jesus is clearly a man. after all, Satan is able to tempt him, even if unsuccessfully. if he were all god, how would that be possible? clearly, the passion suggests that Jesus is human too. god cannot forsake himself. (these are not original thoughts, and i don't claim them to be. it's all in the synthesis, baybee.) what is going on with Satan and Jesus though? i think Satan perceives Jesus as a brother. they are both semigods (i am using this word advisedly, because demigod would imply a hierarchy of gods, and i want it to be clear that nothing i am saying challenges christianity's, or islam's, basic monotheism -- even if each has problematic areas of its scripture that suggest that they are at least ambivalent on the issue.) they both have some area of dominion that has been devolved to them. they both could expect, and both want, god's love. Satan is bitter, i think, above all that god does not love him. a son who is not loved becomes a man capable of doing evil. it is that fundamental. it's never really clear in christian theology what challenge Satan made to god. he cannot have really challenged him, because of course god is omnipotent, and consequently you could never hope to defy him. maybe it is simply that he successfully tempted Eve?
a quick digression. i've often wondered about whether god can, or does, limit himself. he is in principle unlimited. he is omnipotent and omniscient. i think both are largely outcomes of being transcendental. omniscience definitely is. god lies outside the universe, so can see all of its unwinding as though it happened in the same instant. nothing is hidden from him because the universe is spread out like a blanket before him. worst case, he has had eternity to figure out what is what. even if the world was not apparent to him at a glance, he is not restricted in investigating it. but i accept the thesis that he understands everything, knows everything, without need of investigation, and that he can do anything without limit. but here's the thing. i also accept that he might, for some reason, not have done the physical creating. not because he couldn't, but because he chose not to. i accept two possibilities: first, that he may be omnipotent but not necessarily able to choose the means of doing what he wants -- it may help to see what i mean by considering cycling: i can cycle so i am cyclopotent, but i cannot do it without a bicycle! i mean, i'm not restricted in any way in my ability to cycle -- i'm able to do it whenever i choose and i'm good at it -- but without the means of doing it, i am impotent. second, god may choose to limit himself for reasons we do not understand. perhaps he believes that our relationship with him needs to be mediated (although i have more to say about that later, and cannot strictly accept this as a motive for god because of other elements of his story), or perhaps he is willing to suspend his knowledge of the outcomes of allowing Satan to make the world (by just not looking, perhaps) because it would be interesting to him to be surprised. you don't think so? even gods need entertainment, no? and maybe that is why he sends Jesus. letting Satan create the world ended up badly, and Jesus is just god's weird, slightly cryptic way of fixing it. anyway, of course i am accepting that god can limit himself. he is omnipotent but does not have to be all-capable if he doesn't want to be. isn't closing your eyes to what's going on also a power in itself?
so Satan has the ability to tempt Jesus but, of course, he fails to do so. or at least, if Jesus is tempted, he doesn't seal the deal. you understand the moral of the story, of course. each of us is a mini-Jesus. we are all men with an element of godness. and we are all tempted to do wrong for worldly reward. and there's the key. Satan can offer Jesus the world. he can offer dominion, to be a king, to be rich, anything Jesus wants. but Jesus must give up eternal life to have it. no matter how good a salesman Satan is, and he's good, he cannot sell that to Jesus. even if Jesus is not certain about his godhood, he is fairly sure that he will have eternal life. after all, he understands his mission to be to offer it to all mankind.
this story is instructive, because in it we can see the meeting of the nomad and the citizen. the nomad is materially poor but feels himself to be spiritually rich. he is an ascetic, whereas the citizen is to his eyes decadent (more about this in a moment). he is quite sure that accepting a settled life means giving up his soul. it's my belief that the notion of hell was tacked on to christianity, and does not fit, unless it is descriptive of life in the city. because what is at stake is not an eternal life in bliss or one in torture, but an eternal life or none at all. god does not actively punish the sinful. he does not hate them after all. he withdraws his favour. (we have already allowed that god can choose not to know that you will sin when he creates you. this is essential to any scheme of reward and punishment. if god is compelled to know what you will do in your life, you cannot be held responsible for it.)
i think christianity can very much be seen in this frame: the nomad religion that despises the city. in this light, Satan makes more sense. he is the god of the city. he demands that you give up your spirit, your freedom, to become chained to a field, a routine. and your god. the old testament god is approached man to man in the wilderness. Moses has to wander to find him, and he is solitary. so, of course, is Muhammad. it should not be surprising that the gods of people who still felt their nomad roots are desert gods, gods that you have to walk a way to find, personal gods that talk to you in the quiet of the desert night. in the city, religion becomes organised, codified (it's not for nothing that Jesus clashes with the Pharisees -- they have religion but no god). worship is done in crowds, and there is no communion with god except through the crowd (or that is what churches tell us; i don't recall Jesus ever saying we should congregate).
the nomads were scared of cities. they were not just places of decadence. they would even then have quickly become crowded. they were places of disease and squalor. nomads were clean people; at least, they did not accumulate dirt. cities would have been riven by epidemics, stinking cesspools of places. and cities breed slaves. not just those taken by force into servitude, but those who no longer provided their own food, but needed others to give them a living. working for others is servitude. Jesus offers us a way out of servitude, does he not? he says, do not need things. become poor. wander. he is clearly saying, become nomads again and you'll be free.
Satan is the god of cities. he is an artisan himself. he relies on another for his livelihood in a sense. the lack of independence in artisanry must have struck the nomads as hateful. Satan represents the temptation of the apparent ease of the city. he beckons you on, offering relative comfort, never mentioning the downside. the temptation is real. when we look at the skeletons of nomadic people, we can see that they had periods of starvation. in bad seasons, they must truly have suffered, and they must have seen the weaker, or more unlucky, among them die. the temptation lies very much in stored food.
but you must give up your soul to have it.
a question remains though. why is christian morality so tied up in sex? i think the answer is fairly simple. a tribe is a group of related people. it wouldn't necessarily be very large. because pasturage is limited, a nomad band must be fairly small. but it is in the interests of the band to be as large as it can be. it is quite important to the nomad band that its members do not fight, and certainly that they do not kill each other. among groups of young men, women are a major source of conflict.
this isn't women's fault. you can blame our hormones. but men, recognising that they fight over women, try to find ways to prevent conflict. in a civil society, with lawmakers, it is easily done by passing protective laws. but nomads do not have laws. they have no one with the lasting authority to make them. nomads -- traditionally at least -- do not have kings. they do not have hierarchy. their leaders are chosen by acclamation, not because of nobility of birth.
you could argue, and i am doing so here, that nomads were (are, those few that remain) egalitarians. they respected wisdom, and age. these are much the same thing for the following reason. nomads need to understand the whole of their culture. they need to be able to do everything that their people know how to do. nomads do not specialise. the transition from boyhood to manhood for a nomad is long and involved. nomads do not have depositories; they do not have libraries and they do not have specialists, such as scribes or lawyers. they have to rely on the knowledge that the band shares, but to be able to pull their weight, they must internalise this knowledge themselves. contrast this with the citizen, who is a specialist. nomads do not have specialist cooks, fighters, artists, makers. they must each be all of those things. of course, there are some who are better at one thing or another, so there will be trading. but no one can just be a jeweller, or a builder, or a soldier.
above all else, nomads do not need strict organisation, and citizens do. one reason is that nomads in a band all know each other, while cities have far too many inhabitants for them all to know each other well, even if the early cities had few enough for them all to know each other in small measure. another is that nomads have space. they do not have to encroach on each other, and do not particularly need to regulate space. agreements over grazing, yes, rules about property, no.
what i am stumbling around is a central difference between citizens and nomads. citizens have laws; nomads have codes. laws are outcomes of specialisation, trade, hierarchy and, of course, property. codes are outcomes of the need to regulate behaviour. it is no wonder fundamentally mounted cultures have all had strong concepts of honour. a nomad needs honour much more than he needs property. if you do something for someone else, how can you tally that? if the person you have assisted is honourable, you will not need to. (in a city, he pays you, of course.)
sex is central to human life. why it is so important may not be salient to us in our daily lives, but we cannot ignore it. so much of what we think about is to do with it. and men, on the whole, think about it a lot, and their target is generally women. for young men, it's young women. and they are willing to compete for them, even fight for them. in a rougher age, that would have involved spears. that's disastrous for the nomad band. a fit young man represents years of investment of resources for his family. to lose him is a real tragedy. to lose him to another member of the band, who now must in turn be killed, or at least banished, is doubly bad. important too was that there were few young women, and because nomads favoured men (fighters, herders and providers in their view), they probably outnumbered women. if the men wanted sex, and what young man doesn't, they would have had to find their own woman (not easy) or stolen someone else's (much easier). so nomads invented codes of honour surrounding women. but they were in some measure realistic. they didn't bind men with their codes. they bound women.
whether you agree with their reasoning, or not, this is what impelled them. the reason women in some places walk around completely hidden, if they walk around at all, is because nomads felt that the best way to prevent men fighting over attractive women would be to deny them information about who was attractive. they also codified the notion that women could not choose. they were bound to men, and could not choose who to have sex with, because this choice would make them stealable. (i won't go too deeply into why men feel it is important that their partners do not sleep with other men, but it's fairly obvious that particularly in societies that place very strong emphasis on blood ties, not being sure of someone's patrilineage is a bad thing.)
even in tribes that did not practise purdah, there would be strict codes governing sex, built on notions of honour. these codes, then as now, were as strict for women as for men, more so even. they existed to prevent conflict and to defend the only capital, bar livestock, that mattered to nomads.
in cities, much of this becomes meaningless. there is no shortage of people, and family ties are not so important. you do not need to rely on your family group so heavily because you have other linkages. your livelihood can be gained in more specialised ways. sexual codes become (a little) looser. a little looser can spill over into very loose, and to the nomad, a city very much resembles a den of iniquity. they have codified sex as a source of conflict, a bad thing, and now they see places where people are having sex. a lot.
so Satan, god of cities, becomes god of sex too. when he tempts Eve, he tempts her with sex. (her punishment is childbirth, which says a lot about how the early Jews saw sex. and of course christians still see it that way. antiabortionists do not want women to escape their righteous punishment.)
what is strange is that we are not nomads. we are citizens, all of us. i wonder why this schema, born in the desert, still appeals to us. maybe we feel that our lives lack depth, that we too would like to wander out into the wilderness and find our own gods. we owe Satan our lives -- much more comfortable, much more materially rich than those of the nomads -- but even we spurn him. how sad his existence has been, to be king of a world that is ungrateful for what he provides.
so anyway, i've been thinking about Satan. not a religious conversion type thing, don't worry. but thinking about the concept and how it works. there's a great post in that, but this won't be it. sometimes i think about things and they stew instead of brew, iykwim. this will be a pot pourri, rather than a well-rounded essay.
i began thinking about Satan a while back, when i was reading something about muslim philosophers. they struggled with the concept that a transcendental god could create a universe that is made of matter and governed by time. how could Allah interact with matter? it's fairly abstruse but i think it's a reasonable question for a theologian.
the same question struck the gnostics, but from a slightly different angle. the question they had was how could a god that is good create evil? this is a recurrent question in christian theology. their solution was that god did not create the world at all, but employed a demiurge to do it. i think their notion that the demiurge must be evil is not just wrong, but uninteresting. people who can only see things in polarities are unlikely to stumble on insights, if only because the world is not on the whole polar. there are ways in which it is, of course -- handedness in molecules comes to mind (although my understanding is that they are not evenly two-handed, and that chirality is not oppositional) -- but seeing it that way limits your understanding, particularly when considering more complex elements of the world, such as human behaviour. concepts such as good and evil are not ultimately useful in thinking about what people do, and why they do it, because their motives are rarely unitary, and indeed can be seen in different ways from different perspectives. for instance, you may do what you think is necessary, and i may fail to see the need. does that mean you are evil because from my perspective what you do is bad? maybe so, because evil is a value judgement as much as a description.
but whatever the reason for believing that a transcendental god could not or would not do the "dirty work" of creation, we can allow that it's plausible that he did not, and also plausible that he willed into being something that could or would. so i don't think it's difficult to imagine that Satan created the world.
but i also think that it's not necessary to see Satan as evil. he can equally well be considered to be disappointed. imagine. he (it, realistically; it's a bit weird to think of angels, or any other semigod, as gendered) is practically a god. he has awesome powers, and has used them to make a world that is not just intricate, but is fascinating, wonderful, in some ways deep. (when we say world, i think we are saying universe in this case, because surely god did not make anything material in this scenario. but i am perfectly happy to agree that Satan made only the earth, and other demiurges, angels, whatever, made the rest of the material universe. god, after all, does not have to be limited in how many angels he can make.) Satan, by any measure, did a good job. but he doesn't get the credit. god insists that he doesn't. when man comes to be, he praises god, not Satan. indeed, he does not even reocgnise Satan when he presents himself. worse, although Satan has been granted dominion over the earth, he does not get to rule over men's souls. we mean by this only the deeper part of them (if such exists; we are not passing judgement on the ideas, just thinking them through). when men feel there is something more, something greater, Satan is affronted. the ingratitude stings. Satan feels he should be praised, worshipped even, yet men want more. so not only does he not get credit for his work, it is implicitly criticised.
the concept of Satan is rooted in its originators being nomads, or at least pastoralists who were making the (long) transition from a nomadic to a settled life. the theme that nomadic life is superior to settled life is presented strongly in the bible, even into the new testament. the clash between the modes of existence is most famously allegorised in the story of cain and abel. here a shepherd conflicts with an agriculturalist, and the shepherd is strongly favoured. (it's interesting that priests are conceptualised as shepherds, not judges or cultivators, which are symbols of settled life.) god himself can be seen to favour nomads. his chosen people are wanderers who usurp the settled Canaanites. it's not coincidental, surely, that the most prominent city that the Jews overwhelm is Jericho -- possibly the world's first.
but it isn't just in the old testament. Jesus is too a nomad. he urges his followers to give up all their goods and follow him. he is an itinerant and encourages others to become itinerants with him. his forty days are spent in the wilderness, not contemplating things in a settled place. he takes a journey into the wilderness. i find the forty days an incredibly interesting part of the Jesus story. it doesn't really fit with most conceptions of Jesus. I'll explain what i mean.
what is Jesus? it's a serious question. is he a man with intimations of godhood or is he god in human form? i am talking in an abstract sense, not asking what your personal conception of Jesus is (i know that anthony, for instance, will have a readymade answer here, which he will find incredibly difficult to defend because it is dogma, not reasoned; if i have him wrong, i apologise, but i find most of his notions of religion to be dogmatic, which is not intended as an insult, rather than outcomes of reflection -- i don't expect most religious people think their faith through; they either accept or don't accept, and they will tend to believe it in toto, not pick and choose; after all, they did not work it all out for themselves!). people have struggled with this question. indeed, it was a major source of conflict in the byzantine world: people actually fought in the streets basically over whether Jesus had two natures, human and divine, or just the one. (of course, this was the pretext for conflicts over resources, power and so on, rather than something people on the whole believed was worth fighting over -- or at least something that people could be swayed into fighting over by other guys who didn't give a fuck how many natures Jesus had.)
in the wilderness story, Jesus is clearly a man. after all, Satan is able to tempt him, even if unsuccessfully. if he were all god, how would that be possible? clearly, the passion suggests that Jesus is human too. god cannot forsake himself. (these are not original thoughts, and i don't claim them to be. it's all in the synthesis, baybee.) what is going on with Satan and Jesus though? i think Satan perceives Jesus as a brother. they are both semigods (i am using this word advisedly, because demigod would imply a hierarchy of gods, and i want it to be clear that nothing i am saying challenges christianity's, or islam's, basic monotheism -- even if each has problematic areas of its scripture that suggest that they are at least ambivalent on the issue.) they both have some area of dominion that has been devolved to them. they both could expect, and both want, god's love. Satan is bitter, i think, above all that god does not love him. a son who is not loved becomes a man capable of doing evil. it is that fundamental. it's never really clear in christian theology what challenge Satan made to god. he cannot have really challenged him, because of course god is omnipotent, and consequently you could never hope to defy him. maybe it is simply that he successfully tempted Eve?
a quick digression. i've often wondered about whether god can, or does, limit himself. he is in principle unlimited. he is omnipotent and omniscient. i think both are largely outcomes of being transcendental. omniscience definitely is. god lies outside the universe, so can see all of its unwinding as though it happened in the same instant. nothing is hidden from him because the universe is spread out like a blanket before him. worst case, he has had eternity to figure out what is what. even if the world was not apparent to him at a glance, he is not restricted in investigating it. but i accept the thesis that he understands everything, knows everything, without need of investigation, and that he can do anything without limit. but here's the thing. i also accept that he might, for some reason, not have done the physical creating. not because he couldn't, but because he chose not to. i accept two possibilities: first, that he may be omnipotent but not necessarily able to choose the means of doing what he wants -- it may help to see what i mean by considering cycling: i can cycle so i am cyclopotent, but i cannot do it without a bicycle! i mean, i'm not restricted in any way in my ability to cycle -- i'm able to do it whenever i choose and i'm good at it -- but without the means of doing it, i am impotent. second, god may choose to limit himself for reasons we do not understand. perhaps he believes that our relationship with him needs to be mediated (although i have more to say about that later, and cannot strictly accept this as a motive for god because of other elements of his story), or perhaps he is willing to suspend his knowledge of the outcomes of allowing Satan to make the world (by just not looking, perhaps) because it would be interesting to him to be surprised. you don't think so? even gods need entertainment, no? and maybe that is why he sends Jesus. letting Satan create the world ended up badly, and Jesus is just god's weird, slightly cryptic way of fixing it. anyway, of course i am accepting that god can limit himself. he is omnipotent but does not have to be all-capable if he doesn't want to be. isn't closing your eyes to what's going on also a power in itself?
so Satan has the ability to tempt Jesus but, of course, he fails to do so. or at least, if Jesus is tempted, he doesn't seal the deal. you understand the moral of the story, of course. each of us is a mini-Jesus. we are all men with an element of godness. and we are all tempted to do wrong for worldly reward. and there's the key. Satan can offer Jesus the world. he can offer dominion, to be a king, to be rich, anything Jesus wants. but Jesus must give up eternal life to have it. no matter how good a salesman Satan is, and he's good, he cannot sell that to Jesus. even if Jesus is not certain about his godhood, he is fairly sure that he will have eternal life. after all, he understands his mission to be to offer it to all mankind.
this story is instructive, because in it we can see the meeting of the nomad and the citizen. the nomad is materially poor but feels himself to be spiritually rich. he is an ascetic, whereas the citizen is to his eyes decadent (more about this in a moment). he is quite sure that accepting a settled life means giving up his soul. it's my belief that the notion of hell was tacked on to christianity, and does not fit, unless it is descriptive of life in the city. because what is at stake is not an eternal life in bliss or one in torture, but an eternal life or none at all. god does not actively punish the sinful. he does not hate them after all. he withdraws his favour. (we have already allowed that god can choose not to know that you will sin when he creates you. this is essential to any scheme of reward and punishment. if god is compelled to know what you will do in your life, you cannot be held responsible for it.)
i think christianity can very much be seen in this frame: the nomad religion that despises the city. in this light, Satan makes more sense. he is the god of the city. he demands that you give up your spirit, your freedom, to become chained to a field, a routine. and your god. the old testament god is approached man to man in the wilderness. Moses has to wander to find him, and he is solitary. so, of course, is Muhammad. it should not be surprising that the gods of people who still felt their nomad roots are desert gods, gods that you have to walk a way to find, personal gods that talk to you in the quiet of the desert night. in the city, religion becomes organised, codified (it's not for nothing that Jesus clashes with the Pharisees -- they have religion but no god). worship is done in crowds, and there is no communion with god except through the crowd (or that is what churches tell us; i don't recall Jesus ever saying we should congregate).
the nomads were scared of cities. they were not just places of decadence. they would even then have quickly become crowded. they were places of disease and squalor. nomads were clean people; at least, they did not accumulate dirt. cities would have been riven by epidemics, stinking cesspools of places. and cities breed slaves. not just those taken by force into servitude, but those who no longer provided their own food, but needed others to give them a living. working for others is servitude. Jesus offers us a way out of servitude, does he not? he says, do not need things. become poor. wander. he is clearly saying, become nomads again and you'll be free.
Satan is the god of cities. he is an artisan himself. he relies on another for his livelihood in a sense. the lack of independence in artisanry must have struck the nomads as hateful. Satan represents the temptation of the apparent ease of the city. he beckons you on, offering relative comfort, never mentioning the downside. the temptation is real. when we look at the skeletons of nomadic people, we can see that they had periods of starvation. in bad seasons, they must truly have suffered, and they must have seen the weaker, or more unlucky, among them die. the temptation lies very much in stored food.
but you must give up your soul to have it.
a question remains though. why is christian morality so tied up in sex? i think the answer is fairly simple. a tribe is a group of related people. it wouldn't necessarily be very large. because pasturage is limited, a nomad band must be fairly small. but it is in the interests of the band to be as large as it can be. it is quite important to the nomad band that its members do not fight, and certainly that they do not kill each other. among groups of young men, women are a major source of conflict.
this isn't women's fault. you can blame our hormones. but men, recognising that they fight over women, try to find ways to prevent conflict. in a civil society, with lawmakers, it is easily done by passing protective laws. but nomads do not have laws. they have no one with the lasting authority to make them. nomads -- traditionally at least -- do not have kings. they do not have hierarchy. their leaders are chosen by acclamation, not because of nobility of birth.
you could argue, and i am doing so here, that nomads were (are, those few that remain) egalitarians. they respected wisdom, and age. these are much the same thing for the following reason. nomads need to understand the whole of their culture. they need to be able to do everything that their people know how to do. nomads do not specialise. the transition from boyhood to manhood for a nomad is long and involved. nomads do not have depositories; they do not have libraries and they do not have specialists, such as scribes or lawyers. they have to rely on the knowledge that the band shares, but to be able to pull their weight, they must internalise this knowledge themselves. contrast this with the citizen, who is a specialist. nomads do not have specialist cooks, fighters, artists, makers. they must each be all of those things. of course, there are some who are better at one thing or another, so there will be trading. but no one can just be a jeweller, or a builder, or a soldier.
above all else, nomads do not need strict organisation, and citizens do. one reason is that nomads in a band all know each other, while cities have far too many inhabitants for them all to know each other well, even if the early cities had few enough for them all to know each other in small measure. another is that nomads have space. they do not have to encroach on each other, and do not particularly need to regulate space. agreements over grazing, yes, rules about property, no.
what i am stumbling around is a central difference between citizens and nomads. citizens have laws; nomads have codes. laws are outcomes of specialisation, trade, hierarchy and, of course, property. codes are outcomes of the need to regulate behaviour. it is no wonder fundamentally mounted cultures have all had strong concepts of honour. a nomad needs honour much more than he needs property. if you do something for someone else, how can you tally that? if the person you have assisted is honourable, you will not need to. (in a city, he pays you, of course.)
sex is central to human life. why it is so important may not be salient to us in our daily lives, but we cannot ignore it. so much of what we think about is to do with it. and men, on the whole, think about it a lot, and their target is generally women. for young men, it's young women. and they are willing to compete for them, even fight for them. in a rougher age, that would have involved spears. that's disastrous for the nomad band. a fit young man represents years of investment of resources for his family. to lose him is a real tragedy. to lose him to another member of the band, who now must in turn be killed, or at least banished, is doubly bad. important too was that there were few young women, and because nomads favoured men (fighters, herders and providers in their view), they probably outnumbered women. if the men wanted sex, and what young man doesn't, they would have had to find their own woman (not easy) or stolen someone else's (much easier). so nomads invented codes of honour surrounding women. but they were in some measure realistic. they didn't bind men with their codes. they bound women.
whether you agree with their reasoning, or not, this is what impelled them. the reason women in some places walk around completely hidden, if they walk around at all, is because nomads felt that the best way to prevent men fighting over attractive women would be to deny them information about who was attractive. they also codified the notion that women could not choose. they were bound to men, and could not choose who to have sex with, because this choice would make them stealable. (i won't go too deeply into why men feel it is important that their partners do not fuck other men, but it's fairly obvious that particularly in societies that place very strong emphasis on blood ties, not being sure of someone's patrilineage is a bad thing.)
even in tribes that did not practise purdah, there would be strict codes governing sex, built on notions of honour. these codes, then as now, were as strict for women as for men, more so even. they existed to prevent conflict and to defend the only capital, bar livestock, that mattered to nomads.
in cities, much of this becomes meaningless. there is no shortage of people, and family ties are not so important. you do not need to rely on your family group so heavily because you have other linkages. your livelihood can be gained in more specialised ways. sexual codes become (a little) looser. a little looser can spill over into very loose, and to the nomad, a city very much resembles a den of iniquity. they have codified sex as a source of conflict, a bad thing, and now they see places where people are fucking. a lot.
so Satan, god of cities, becomes god of sex too. when he tempts Eve, he tempts her with sex. (her punishment is childbirth, which says a lot about how the early Jews saw sex. and of course christians still see it that way. antiabortionists do not want women to escape their righteous punishment.)
what is strange is that we are not nomads. we are citizens, all of us. i wonder why this schema, born in the desert, still appeals to us. maybe we feel that our lives lack depth, that we too would like to wander out into the wilderness and find our own gods. we owe Satan our lives -- much more comfortable, much more materially rich than those of the nomads -- but even we spurn him. how sad his existence has been, to be king of a world that is ungrateful for what he provides.
so anyway, i have nothing to say. you don't want to know, and i don't want to talk about it. i know you don't want to know because anyone i try to talk to just isn't interested. people who claim to care about me, don't. it's not a shock. i hate you sufficiently these days to expect it of you. everyone is just too preoccupied with their own shit to bother with mine. if you are reading this and feel it is an indictment of you personally; it is. if you are reading this and feel it is unfair because you are doing your best; you are not.
why should you though? we mostly coast through our lives, and do not bother ourselves much. and we live in a culture that tells us it's all about us. i don't claim to be any different.
i have been despondent since the night i lost a lot of money at poker. it's not the money. i don't care about that at all. it's that i felt i was getting somewhere, and now i feel that a door has slammed in my face.
but you think it is nothing. so what, just move on. but i have nowhere to move on to. i have not written anything this year. not a thing. i felt confident i would. i told mrs zen that i would write a whole book this year. i even made a bet with her. i will now have to pay her off because i didn't write a single word of it. and i won't next year either. what's the point? i don't feel confident, and that lack of confidence has been justified. no one is interested. no one likes my writing much. people with taste find it boring.
even if they didn't, i couldn't push it. that's not me. i am a terrible salesman. i keep hoping that i will write something i will feel confident enough in that even i can't deny it's good. but i destroy any hope of that by not even having the confidence to begin.
maybe that's a thing i do on purpose, so that i can just not try, and by not trying, avoid failure. but if i haven't failed, what else can you say about my life?
nothing except that i've stopped caring. it's the root of the melancholy that has been killing me. it is like lantana in the fields of my self, strangling everything that i am about. now i am about nothing and i wish i was richer. that is all. i simply wish i had stopped caring earlier so that i would now be rich. obviously i could have been. it's only my conscience that has stopped me.
there is no point bothering with me any more. i don't, why should you? the wise money has already fucked off. i was hurt for a while when s disappeared. it seemed grossly unfair that she should judge me, when she had been so wrong. but of course i know she is not someone who even considers that she can be wrong, and as a coping mechanism, it's not bad. i was annoyed that k stopped bothering, particularly because i knew she was still reading my blog, hoping to see her name, i don't doubt. i felt, damnit, she would realise that she had blown it, lost the chance to have something good in her life. good for her, i mean, not good in a bigger sense. but i was wrong and she was right. i am just another fucktard.
so anyway, if sanctions don't stop Iran from doing something it isn't doing, Israel will attack Iran?
are any of these people sane?
i'll say this. if these people attack Iran, they are criminals and need to be treated that way. not that they are not criminals anyway. turning a significant chunk of the territory you claim to own into a concentration camp should be considered a crime imo. and wtf at bombing Syria for fun.
and yeah, i know, the answer is no, they are not. ldo.
so anyway, like the buddha i saw a dead body in the street and realised i had to die. nah, i'm lying obv., i already knew i had to die, and was already pissed off about it, and i haven't become any more enamoured of the idea since. but seeing that man in the gutter made me sad. to die without anyone to care for your remains, without anyone to think enough of you to cart you away, that seemed sad. i feel that way about myself. someone will care, but out of obligation. is that what it comes down to, that i have people who will feel obliged and he didn't?
every picture i see of my niece l, she looks terrified, horrified. i notice it more in her than i did in my own children, but i remember that naughtyman had a look of absolute horror, on the rare occasions he opened his eyes the first few weeks of his life. he was a quiet infant but he has come out of his shell. he will yell at people in the street, what's your name? and hello x, where x is the name of the person if he knows it. he does not push himself forward but he is not shy. and he loves to dance. he loves the shitmat song that quotes thomas the tank engine. he loves thomas, the toy trains and the show but more so something abstract. i'm not sure what that is. he is not the sort to talk much about what he feels. i guess he lacks language for it.
but whenever we are listening to music in the car, he asks for the thomas song. he jigs like he's on a hot plate to the breakcore bits and bounces to the thomas bit, where shitmat cuts thomas together with that informer song. i am making a tape as i write this, one side of mostly mellow dance music, the other mellow rock. i'm listening to blumenwiese neben autobahn, which is at the more idm end of Ulrich Schnauss' range (his shoegazer stuff is pretty good, if you think a techno Slowdive cover band is a good idea, and if not, why not?). so i was listening to who is it by Bjork, and what a good song that is. i am going to see bjork next month. she is playing at the big day out and i'm going with m. i haven't been to a gig for, well, years, and i worship bjork. i've changed my mind about her newest album. it's not up there with vespertine for me (but what is?) but more listens bring out the nuance, and bjork excels at nuance. Schnauss has given way to the Wolfgang Press, see my wife, which is typically demented Press. i once saw them support the Pixies at Brighton Top Rank. me and n, a leftist skinhead (a weird concept but more common than you might suppose--after all, many skinheads were into ska and jamaican culture, including agricultural products, iykwim), were the only people dancing, and we were well into it. i'm pretty sure that the band appreciated our efforts, because after a couple of songs, the whole fucking crowd had gone off, and even though they were mostly indie kids into the rock end of it, they were going mental for the Press' leftfield funk. the Pixies, i have to tell you, took off. i have never known a band be so electric, and burn a place up like they did. forget the stuff you have been to watch, they were -- and i'm told still are -- the best live band ever.
now the Press has passed, and i am listening to Broken Social Scene's lover's spit. it's the version from beehives, acoustic and lovely. unfortunately, naughtyman is shouting and screaming because his computer game has ended and he wants someone to load him a fresh one. still, i will love listening to it in the car on dark, lonely nights, coming back from the supermarket.
how can this world be bad when we have such beautiful things? i see the parrots flash past, and can see why people have believed a god made this world for them. i do not know why we evolved an aesthetic sense. taste, smell, touch, yes, they're useful, even discrimination of sounds, but the appreciation of beauty doesn't seem to have any purpose but to make life seem glorious.
sometimes i feel angry that we have to fight. we could just be friends. we are all just trying to get by. but you don't like the music i like and i don't like the books you read, and we can't agree on food to eat, places to go, things to do. we could live and let live, but we are so afraid that left alone, our own several planets, we will spin out of orbit, and die with no one to care what becomes of our remains.
but listen, surely you like tomboy by bettie serveert? you have to, surely? it's naughtyman's song, because it feels optimistic to me, and because it says that you can turn around a harsh word, own it and rise above it all. and i do believe, despite everything, that we can be better than we are. i try not to. i try to have as little faith in you as you do in yourself, but i see you smiling and you are beautiful when the child shines out of the grown face, and i cannot hate you.
i am listening to se laest by sigur ros. it rounds out the tape. it is like a lullaby, but also a symphony. if you can like that, i can kiss you. if i can kiss you, we can be friends forever. i'm simple like that.
on that subject, i have been picturing me and father luke, sitting out on the deck (in this picture, i have a deck; in real life, we would probably be walking or maybe just sitting by the creek at Karawatha, something like that). we have ice jingling in the glass, me a vodka and tonic, the padre a lime and soda or something like that. we are stiff and manly. i can imagine don there too. we will prove that we can be different but still love each other. i'm not afraid of that word, btw. and while we are socialising, tom would come and play the guitar for us. we'd have a few bowls of puff -- in this picture the padre will not stand on pride but will realise that this is a day off from his life, and he can still be sober tomorrow -- and we will talk stuff until we have no more stuff to talk. hey, if we're talking stuff, we'd better have zero along. i have a sneaking feeling he and i would make firm friends. don't feel left out if i haven't mentioned you -- i am just riffing, not picking favourites. there is not a single person who reads this blog regularly who would not be a good person to meet and spend an evening spewing stuff with. well, maybe not gunt, unless he was under a good behaviour bond.
the tape is finished. that's all i have to say for now. mrs zen has turned on eastenders. sublime to ridiculous, innit.
