Nothing to Dread

I find this song really comforting.

Reads out like a lullaby:

 

 

Don’t be scared no, no
We ain’t prepared no, no
Dreamt of ventures and
Woke up to the sound of the trenches you dig in my mind

Ah, you’ve got a lot to learn

What’s a kingdom
To the man who has sold off his soul just to claim it

Sirens, harlots, bohemians, coloured haze of the street horizon

Ah, you’ve got a lot to learn
Oh, he’s got some time to burn

Don’t you know you got nothing to dread
Don’t you know you got nothing to dread
Don’t you know you got nothing to dread
though you know you’ve got a coffin to drag

A hit and run is just not fun
Lock up your fine sons my dear
The grave of love
We’d cuddle up
Drink summer beer
And then smoke tea

She’s like the devil to the moon
she’s howling, laughing, joking like a kingsnake crawling, crawling

And the herd and the masses, The rings and the turkey, The trimmings the trappings you know you’ve gotta have it all

Don’t you know you got nothing to dread Don’t you know you got nothing to dread.
Don’t you know you got nothing to fear,
every girl’s got a secret to wear

You know you got nothing to dread
everyone’s got a secret to wear
You know you’ve got nothing to dread
every girl’s got a secret to bury
To dread, to dread, to dread, to dread
To dread, to dread, to dread, to dread

It’s Only When You Become a Mother…

… that you can fully appreciate what an incredible achievement it is that we grow up to think of our toilet habits as second nature.

It’s a Fine Line Between Pleasure and Pain…

There is joy in picking up random publications abandoned by other commuters on the Underground. This week I picked up the Guardian’s G2 supplement (Wednesday 18th March, 2009) with a sort of disinterested apathy that was quickly replaced by serious pondering.

 

Have you ever heard a group of newly-birthed mothers talk? It often works like this:

 

‘I was in labour for 52 hours! 52 hours! She was completely stuck in there, poor thing! The surgeon kept hovering over me with a scalpel but I threatened to disembowel him if he dared come within 20ft of my bed. Thank God for the Epidural, though. Did you tear?’

 

 

‘Yah, I tore a whole 6 inches but I was soooo not going to have an Epidural, darling. I wanted my birth to be sacred, little Hermione was born sans anaesthesia. We had Annabel Karmel come in person to my water birth to stir-fry the placenta with Tofu! So nutritious! Really the BEST for breastfeeding, darling. How about you, Dotty, how was your labour?

  

 

‘It was really, really hard… Unlike anything else…  I pushed so hard  that I shat myself.’

 

It is said that childbirth requires as much energy as running a marathon, so it’s no wonder we treat it like a race. Women can get more competitive about it than they would about the girth of their thighs. But Viv Groskop reports a whole new trend in one-upwomanship about to sweep the planet: THE ORGASMIC BIRTH.

 

YES! Women, you no longer need to be afraid of genital mutilation or protracted pain! We now have people who want women ‘to break through their fear and have a beautiful experience of birthing’. Well, birth IS a beautiful experience, although for some this beauty is not dissimilar to that of Munch’s ‘The Scream’. Most of us will come back home with a child we do not wish to flush down the toilet straight away.

 

According to Marsden Wagner MD (should that read ‘Male Douchebag?), ‘It’s got to be how it is when you make love with someone. It’s got to be safe, secure and uninterrupted.’ I am guessing his sex life is an insufferable bore.

 

Humour aside for a moment, I can almost see how this phenomena could be more than a myth created by smug Earth mother types. Contractions rise, peak and wane  just like orgasms, and trust me, leave your eyes just as watery and your head just as fuzzy. And it is true that ‘the noises women make are similar to those of love-making – which can embarrass their partners.’ Maybe some EXTREMELY FORTUNATE women have a little switch in their brains that makes all these feral sensations shift from excrutiating pain into excrutiating pleasure. Remember Barbarella, when she is in the ‘Excessive Machine’(thanks, Posie for reminding me of that one. Good thing old Barbie showed Durand Durand who is boss)? Hmmmmm. Hmmmm. Hmmmm.  And who doesn’t like a gentle little bite on the nape of the neck? Or a little crack of the whip? Or like, when something hurts but it’s a nice kind of pain, a really nice kind of pain? Or when… Ah, I digress.

 

I just know that when the Epidural kicked in, the feeling of pain sweeping away from my body was like being on cloud 9 with a battery operated Johnny Depp and beautiful sunsets and wonderful music and exploding ecstasy for ever and ever and ever.

 

 

Until the bloody thing wore off, of course.

I’m Guffawing Into My Bib!

Ok.

I stumbled upon a link on a friend’s website. A friend who happens to be extremely dogged and often longsighted in her views. It was a link she put below my own ‘Professional Housegirlfriend’ link. It read ‘Why Women Hate Men’.

 

Being a feminist in the most egalitarian way possible, I felt revulsed by the elitism of the link. Certain that I was about to unravel many more episodes of prejudice heretofore unscathed by my sharp postmodernist melange to everything, I clicked.

 

OH MY OH MY I WAS GOING TO SAY OH MY F****** G** but then I remembered I am beyond such narrowed methods of thinking.

 

Please, please learn about Pete, the main reason mermaids break into applause when they realise they do not have a vagina.

Yippee Yippee Yippee

Not many of us can feel proud to have a sicky.

 

Or to get real lippy

 

Realise your mum’s got a hicky?

 

Yip yip yip yippeeeeeeee!

Where did I find it in myself to tell my boy to go? It makes me want to die.

The above was the melodramatic headline that grabbed my fickle attention in today’s Telegraph. Novelist Julie Myerson does us all the enormous favour of recounting the build-up and aftermath of kicking out her 17-year-old son from her family home. Educational indeed!

I was suckered into reading this tosh for the obvious maternal desire to prepare myself for the hell raising teenage years that await me. My interest was purely didactic, evidently, obviously, natch. No, not voyeuristic at all. Honest guv.

 

Turns out the kid decided he was going to be a little brat, refusing to get out of bed or let alone attend school, throwing tantrums and torrents of abuse at his bewildered parents. In one particularly amusing incident, the boy stays in bed while the family is moving house until the only thing left to put in the lorry is his bed, with him in it.

 

I am sure I will be eating my words at some point, because every mother is going to pull her hair out whenever her child goes through a difficult phase, so maybe it’s a little bit hypocritical of me to snigger. But there were many many things about this article that annihilated my sympathy for the author.

 

The principal reason offered for the boy’s sudden change in behaviour is ‘addiction to cannabis’, which supposedly caused him to steal, constantly demand cash, come home ‘high and wired’, have terrible mood swings. She mentions a particular episode when he came home zombiefied, with tiny pupils. Mylady, that’s not cannabis, that’s heroin. That at least partly explains his horrific demands for cash and him thumping you in the ear when you didn’t give it to him. Well, that’s my theory anyway. At least one of us is overreacting to the circumstances or in denial about the bigger picture. I’m hoping it’s me.

I find it peculiar that I was reading this story and sympathising with her pain as a mother, but finding it inevitable to read between the lines and imagining how her son must feel. In the extract, she declares to the entire nation that he got a 16-year-old girl pregnant and that ‘we<the parents> book a termination for first thing Monday morning. It’s private but we don’t dare wait for an NHS appointment. Her mood could change at any time.’

WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT? Did I really just read that? What a complete and utter BITCH!!!! After it’s all over and done with, she stops to realise the grief that SHE feels at ‘the termination of what was almost certainly my embryo grandchild’. The feelings of others are noticeably absent.

Selfish automaton.

I am surprised at the final paragraph, where she states he actually agrees to meet her again in a neutral location and is understanding when she gives him the book she has written about the situation. She says ‘I was dreading giving it to you (…)But you see, I had to write it. It was the only thing I could possibly write’.  In previous posts I’ve mentioned how difficult it is to write anything when you have something that heartwrenching on your mind. If she makes her living as an author, I am not surprised some of it would leak into her writing somewhere. But to churn it into a book costing £12.99 a pop, to sell an article to the Saturday Telegraph with family photographs, a recent photograph of said boy walking down the street, personal details and even more personal revelations… Jeez I think I would have punched her too.

Girino Incompetente

Alguem proteja

todos os anfibios do mundo

Sinto raiva dos sapos que beijei

Sinto o amargo dos que engoli

Sinto luto pela

perereca que espremi aos doze anos

na batedura da porta do banheiro rosa

Sem querer.

O amor pelos girinos que tentei

criar num pote velho de Doriana.

Lagartixas

Lagartixas e mais lagartixas.

Baratas

Besouros

Ai, que engracado, ne? Que hilario.

Inclusive

Nem seu melhor amigo

Nem sua mae

Nem os monstros do escuro

Nem a droga da favela

Nem o sexo do bofe

Nem o maior IBOPE

Sem o seio, nem o seio

nem o ventre

Nem as veias nem

os corneos

nem a mente

Nem as pernas a vagina

os joelhos e o ventre

Nem meus pais meus pes

meus calcanhares e alicerces

meus pulsos

meus solucos

Esquece, Esquece

Esquece.

Licking Salty Wounds

The thing about writing on such a personal level is that it makes it near impossible to suffer with the smallest fragment of dignity. Something’s pissed you off and you do your best to keep that brave face smiling on,  but  the minute you find a pen in your hand or a keyboard at your fingertips it’s like all your thoughts start to race against each other to get out. Which is why I haven’t been writing much lately. I realise this is getting beyond ridiculous now, so I’m here, facing my concern that the words are going to slip and feed me to the lions. Bastard words.

 

One thing I think I can relate without giving too much personal stuff away is that I have suffered the misfortune of being dumped. Yes. I’ve been dumped, dumped, DUMPED. And had it been a man who dumped me, I’d probably be asking myself if my bum’s too big or my boobs are too small. Unfortunately, some deeper soul-searching is necessary at this point because I’ve been dumped by a girl. I’ve been dumped by one of my bestest, most dearest, most beloved girlfriends.  OUCH.

 

Why? Why? Why? How long ago did she stop loving me? Should I have noticed her patience was wearing thin? Have I not been a good enough friend? Am I not cool enough, not funny enough, not loyal enough, not enough of a good listener? The pain in my heart led to Tracey Emin moments in my bed. My dearest, my beloved, my favourite fairy.  Gone. Flew out of my front door, daughter in hand.

 

The thing about being dumped by a friend is that the ‘rebound’ technique really doesn’t work. Sympathy kinda alleviates the pain a bit, but getting a new best mate isn’t quite as easy as getting a shag. There are lots of parallels that can be drawn to the experience of losing a lover, though, and one of them is the modern mallaise of flippin’ facebook. Second to being dumped, I was erased from facebook. Ouch. But why should I care, right? How silly. But the flipside is I know who her ‘new best friend’ is, and I have the privilege of seeing the adoring messages she writes on NBF’s wall. Grrr. The anger.

 

A jilted friend, like a jilted lover, is prone to attacks of jealousy. And the little me, missing my friend who would call me at 3am so that I could talk her out of a panic attack feels insanely jealous of this shiny brand new girl. Doesn’t she care what I’ve been doing? Doesn’t she miss me? And like a jilted lover, I sound desperate and moany, and behind the eyes of those patting me on the back I can read the looks that tell me to move on.

Regressing Like Brad Pitt in that Weird Film

‘London is a palimpsest’. Was it Peter Aykroyd who said that? I think it was.

 

This week the capital saw the closure of some of its foremost rock venues. The block on the corner of Oxford Street and Charring Cross Road is being demolished to comport the extension of Tottenham Court Road Station. It’s inevitable that the city needs to swallow up concrete sometimes but like many people I feel a sharp pang of sadness. The backdrop to so many of my teenage exploits is turning to rubble.

 

Before I could walk past the London Astoria and remember Spliknot’s first UK tour(yeah, I KNOW. That was a short phase. Good loops). Or going to see Therapy? for the first time at the LA2. And then there is Metro’s, my home away from home, the stage of my first English friendships, my boyfriend fainting in my arms and subsequently dumping me(must have got concussed), hanging around Trafalgar Square at 4am and surviving on a diet of cider and snickers. Wearing black lipstick and dog collars. Aaaah bless. The music moved me so much it hurt in my heart.

 

I went to say goodbye to Metro this tuesday and made sure I made homage to the 16-year-old me. Jumping over the fence to smoke a fag in Soho Square(Why?!!!!!) then having to make a swift escape as I got spotted by bobbies on the beat. Starting a moshpit that resulted in me getting a fat lip and a collection of impressive and painful bruises. Headbanging so much my shoulders hurt two days later.

 

It was worth it. Soon I’ll walk past there and all that will be left to tell the story will be the local tramps hanging by the cash machines. I want a little picture tattoed in my brain to remind me of all that was and of all the nights I can barely remember.