Repairing The Road

Is what is going outside here today; it means i am sort of stuck here. But it is half term anyway so I was only planning on a trip to the gym. I thought the time was right for a quick gym update, so here goes: I have recently completed 100 miles on the exercise bike in 3 weeks rather than 4, which was the challenge (in aid of Breast Cancer) though I did it at the expense of everything else and ended up with some rather nice thighs. I have been bench pressing a mere 20kg (30 if you include the bar, or at least that's what the guy tells me) but it is creating some new chest muscle.

Unfortunately I continue to drink far too much, and eat too much fatty and salty stuff. This means I now resemble a cut-n-shut human being. Waist downwards: athletic, poised, full of youth and vitality. Waist upwards: balding barrage balloon.

End of update.

Some Beautiful Women

..do actually like the drummer and admit the pre-eminence of alcohol in their liking. This is no bad thing. Alcohol is a truth serum. It works especially well after a week's disappointing, indeed piss-poor, work. It works even better faced with decades old hatreds and loves. All women are beautiful by virtue of not being men, some women are even more beautiful by virtue of being known to TTD. Some, especially unlucky women, are exceptionally weird by virtue of being specifically close to TTD at a given moment in time (ie are somewhere near).

For example: people I hated are dead. People I loved are dead. I visit the grave of someone I hated three times a year: that's because he died aged 19. People I loved are selfish old cunts and they leave nothing and nowhere to go. I wish they would just go and fuck off out of memory. And, doubtless, they will: and by then, so will go my life, my memory and my self. I visit someone else's grave: "Woody something[can't remember]Pecker" out of the nation's chess magazine, who died aged 28, and who I played so much snooker with and drank with and kept score with at cricket matches. We got so pissed and we played so much cider-fuelled snooker at the Oxford Union. We are old, we die, we decay and the hair falls out of our booze-headed follicles. And he told me he had cancer and I--I--forgot, I mis-remembered, I mis-took, I mis-spoke.

I forgot.


I forgot.


I forgot he was dying.


He died.



I will die.


I think his resting place is too cold and too dark.

I don't think he will mind. His father might, as he is there with him. They might appreciate the shade but then again they will be chilly and will need to wrap up.




So does family decay and die.



Fucking bastards: why are living beings such utter cunts?? Why do they go and die when you want to go & love them the most? Why do they fuck off out of your life and survive when you want them to survive with you against the floods so much you'd rather die?


*In My Mind's Eye*


There are women who love me and who I sort of love in different ways. Here goes a recent chat:

The conversation in question went something like this. Let a be the woman and let t be TD. Let x be the moment that TD realised that a did not want to sleep with him. Let z be the moment she realised her utter distaste for him.

a: I like you quite a lot, I find you bright and thoughtful.
t: Oh you're too kind. I mean, really. Actually I'm a wanker.
a: That's just the alcohol talking.
t: Well, you'd like to think so. Actually it's completely true.
a: Oh I'm sure it isn't.
t: It is.

x

a: How do you live with yourself?
t: With Stella, with sleep and with Tears for Fears.
a: you're joking.
t: No.
a: So you're telling me you're an alcoholic conservative with suicidal tendencies?
t: Apart from the suicidal tendencies, yes.

z

a: I have to....go and have a shit now.
t: Aha, shit! One of the joys of living! have you ever thought-
[TD gets his remaining light punched out]


Actually the above conversation is invented and is a lie, by all accounts and on all measures of truth. I do become animated upon talk of egestion but that is entirely satiric, and is intended to demonstrate my linking lavatorial desires with sexual ones, and hence to prove the ultimate futility and disgusting-ness of the human body. Many people do not understand this, which is why I have few friends, but with any luck the message will start to get through soon (heh heh).

So they go....

So I go....

So goes time and hair and heartbeats and blood pressure.


*Oi! John! Two pints of lager and a packet of crisps!*


**








** My dear first love,who I don't even know if she is still alive, she would tell me she loved my eccentricities and my weirdnesses, but above all she loved my hair...she loved my hair...my hair....

Final Body Image Update

For the avoidance of any doubt, the other chap who resembles me physically and more importantly emotionally (and intellectually) is this fellow:

Self Portrait (Body Image Update II)

He is so cool, isn't he? And just cop the size of his brekkers. For me that's just not enough food. And his utterly innocent delight in food remains, despite his humbling at the hands of the giant. The morality of this book is superior and more nuanced than that of many grown up publications, including almost all newspapers. Maybe not The Daily Sport. You see: he realises that it's wrong to eat so much, but he still loves food because eating is a wonderful and beautiful experience, and that in itself is not wrong, indeed it is a pleasure of living which should be extended to all, by natural right. He doesn't really talk of poverty or famine but I like to think that is implicit in his recognition of the immorality of gluttony.

Anyway, for those of you who've been wondering, the resemblance is remarkable, except my skin is more pinkish. I have only a little more hair than he does. My legs are about the same size. I guess my smile isn't as broad as his.

Body Image Update

See the post or two below. Bodies are odd things, most human bodies, of whatever sex, being of comic misshapenness, my own foremost among these. I have praised female bodies in one of today's posts, and the praise is entirely genuine. I do, however, think that pornography as we conceive it proves the lie of my adoration and conviction. The truth is we adore only certain bodies, and some bodies identify powerful desires, giving us the need for touch and warmth, while others don't (ie mine). whether this is societal or genetic or cultural I have, literally, no idea. Pornography really struggles to provide comedy or irony, though it tries: hence I think it means something, really tries to be modern rather than post-modern, and latches onto very real perceptions and dreams. Possibly it is the techonological working out of Freudian dreams and even subconscious fantasies ( big tits? milf?). I do think there's a distinction to be made between pornography and fashion. The two, at times, seem to be working in opposing directions. Whatever the truth of it, I think there is a lot more to come (ho ho) from pornography, both as a leisure activity and as a major source of release, as well as an increasingly powerful driver of body image. I speak here only of heterosexual pornography, which seems to have few problems with bald, ugly or overweight male performers, provided they have the requisite equipment. Or stamina. Or whatever. It needs someone rather more specialised than myself properly to conjecture whether or not pornography sets trends or works from them. What, exactly, is the extent of its influence? Judging from the number of playboy pencil cases, diaries, and other accessories I have seen in school (owned, with a crushing degree of inevitability, by girls) it's reasonably extensive.

Anyhow, I wanted to mention that there are only two working bits of my body left. 1) My brain. In fact this is not working, and only seems to be because it is keeping my heart beating. It has not really worked since 1998, when it was in pretty sharp condition. 2) My arse. In fact this doesn't work well either, but I find more satisfaction in its movements and ideas.

One might also argue that my spleen is working. I couldn't possibly comment. Also my liver is probably doing a good job. I daren't ask it, however...

Woman In Chains

So the nicking from Tears for Fears continues....

This is more of a thought than a post, really, which comes from a convesation I had yesterday with a very beautiful woman, who thinks she needs to lose weight. She does not. Her daughter, she says, suffers from real self-image problems for the same reason. Why does this happen in our "civilisation"? Why do young (and not so young) women seem to have such problems so often? I have yet to meet a heterosexual man who does not adore the curves and softnesses of a woman's mysterious, delightful body. I have curves myself of course, but then again they _shouldn't_ be there. I understand that sometimes these issues are caused by health concerns. Fair enough. That's the root of mine, as well as the fact that breasts are attractive on women and not on men. But otherwise - straight men love female bodies that move and undulate, that press against clothing, that can enfold them.

I guess I understand some of the myriad reasons for the problems that women have (including, probably, a male dominated world of media and pornography), but I ask, in all naivety and innocence: what is there not to love in a beautiful, curvy woman?

Has She Gone Away?

Well, the answer is "yes". I am trying to write, and think, in the style of Betsy Byars's "The Midnight Fox" but this is really, really, hard. It requires, firstly, an infinite adaption of an adult mind, and a remarkable ability to think like an innocent, but intelligent, and moreover, fictional, character. A fictional character. Someone who winks in and out of existence when the pages are opened and closed. But someone you'd want to exist. Tom is one of life's, and fiction's, really darn good guys. The odd thing is: he doesn't exist: but having read, studied, and taught the book over and over I find this really hard to believe. So, is it more important that you're brilliant and not real, or that you're flawed and somehow exist, against all chance and change and desire? Aha- well, you fall for the ontological argument, of a kind, in assuming your existence predicates some kind of betterness than non-existence. The "X" (why not call you Bob?), the "Bob" of someone else's imagining is always and everywhere better, deeper, more original, than the "Bob" that you actually are, because it is more perfect and more coherent. You're a collaboration of ideas and organs, and things-always-tempted-to-switch-off and so your being here could be said to affirm St Anselm, but then again it doesn't because the versions of you in your mind or someone else's are always so much better: more evil, more intelligent, sexier, more good, whatever. You reach your perfections as someone else's fantasy.

What happens if you are no-one's fantasy? If you just have to blog your way through the greyness of streets and life? The answer is nothing. Nothing happens. You just are, and, worse, you just have to _be_. For example, I am currently nursing my copy of "Viz: The Turtle's Head" through its final stages of collapse. This comic book has sustained me over 12 years of fart and poo jokes, and also some jokes about wanking. Now it is succumbing to entropy and I will lose 12 years of comfort and assurance: the bastard world is in fact full of incoherence and ridiculousness (as I've pointed out in previous posts, taking the human body seriously is stupid - but somehow there are legions of people po-facedly talking about sex, while refusing to acknowledge poo). You are, with Viz, with drink, with news, with blogging, with whatever, even work: and you leave a trail of some kind, you make a brief indentation, like your fat arse on a sofa, then it's all over and you're gone and no-one gives a toss.

Still, never mind, "Bob". Why not just piss off down the pub and leave everything else, which is just management bollock-speak, to sort itself out? After all, no-one will remember, after things have changed, after things have moved on and gone forward: after you've fucked off, which is what everyone's really waiting for.

"You were a photograph" - of the worst, unsuspecting, short-necked, fat-gutted kind. With a head of hair that would rather be down the drain than on your head.

So it goes.

I never did catch Betsy Byars' style.