Glob-a-log

Busy, busy, busy.

“You! Out of the way!”

Chchchch…! went the cat – but it also buggered off to the kitchen.

Now, where was that damn thermos flask? I wanted to take the girlfriend to the park – and I wanted to bring cocktails, so I needed something to keep them cold…

I also needed to put on another rain song. When you want to go on a picnic, you need to play or sing lots of rain songs. You don’t want the Gods to suspect you’ve actually planned for something outdoors. Gods are like cats: you can’t trust Them. They think only of Themselves, They’re fickle and They like to torture smaller creatures. (And yeah, we are indeed very much built in Their own image. Don’t beat it: sometimes it helps sussing Them out.)

Ah, perfect: that old song. And there was the thermos, cowering among the books on my shelves.

“Gotcha!”

“Fuck.” said the thermos.

It doesn’t like cold drinks. It claims ice-cubes hurt its linings. Tough. Now what? Yes. Feed the cat. I had to keep the little monster happy for at least another day. Then the girlfriend would go back to Tokyo again. Till that dreaded moment I wanted peace and quiet. Afterwards, I probably wouldn’t care much, one way or the other, for quite a while. So, time to feed the brute.

Chchchchch…! went the cat, when I entered the kitchen, still annoyed that I’d chased it out of the living-room.

“Oh, get over it.” I said, “What do you want: fish or liver?”

“Don’t care. I’ll get you for all of this! See if I don’t.”

“Or I can swap you for two goldfish, a talking elephant, or a cute, little rat…”

I put the cat’s dinner in its bowl. When it started to do unspeakable things to the food, I went back to the living-room.

Right: got cocktails, got food; got the blanket, two cushions; got plates and glasses… Okay. Time to relax a bit, till the girlfriend came back from yet another cultural round-up. After a while the cat came back into the living-room and sat down on my newspaper.

“You, sir, are a nuisance.”

Prrrt.

“I was reading that…”

Prrrt…

“Some story about a girl writing with George Harrison’s mum. Can you imagine: here she is – hot for some Beatle. She sends him locks of pubic hair, or underwear or some such and then his bloody mum writes back to her… ”

Prrrt…!!!

The cat couldn’t care less. It wanted to be stroked, and scratched behind its ears. So, I stroked the cat, and scratched it behind its ears. It was a very peaceful period, enjoyed by all. Till the cat spotted some invisible adversary somewhere in the room. It used me as its launching pad, drawing some blood and hurled itself at the curtains, destroying two flower pots. Then it ran through the room for a few minutes, hissing like mad, its fur a-blazing, before sitting down again (on my newspaper), where it calmly started to lick its left paw.

“That hurts” I complained, licking my own bloody paw.

“Johnny Cash hurts” the cat said; “You are a sissy.”

After that, another spell of peace and quiet.

I told myself again that, after the girlfriend had left, I might very well book myself a room, for a week, in a certain hotel. To do a bit of self-indulgent grieving, to be sure, but mostly to get away from the cat. It was either that or a midnight visit to the nearest canal, with a sack and a few stones – for the cat or for me.

Henry David Thoreau once - more or less famously - said:

You cannot kill time without injuring eternity.

Some Leeds University researchers, looking for a proper biscuit, hadn’t heard or just didn’t agree. Mind you, those nicely coined paper snapshots can never stand too much analysis - and even the most jaded gambler would call their bluff any day of the week.

While it would, for instance, indeed be quite hurtful to kill even the small amount of time it would take to watch her biopic, would you really prefer to spend the alternative, eternity, with this woman?

Furthermore, if you were a lobster in an Italian theatre you’d really rather have people kill time than inflict the kind of injuries that moonlight as fast-forwarding portals to eternity.

Anyway, infinity may welcome careful drivers but it’s rather doubtful that its twin sister eternity would welcome, let alone reimburse careful philosophers for the time they wasted, Al Capone style, on her behalf.

It would, in truth, be better to sick Shakespeare on philosophers as well – and stick to poets:

Dry the pool, dry concrete, brown edged,
And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight,
And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly,
The surface glittered out of heart of light,
And they were behind us, reflected in the pool.
Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty.
Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,
Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.
Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.

Some days ago, a poor PR woman got hold of the wrong end of His stick, when she confused Easter eggs with the hatching rather than the dispatching of Christ. Mind you, the whole Easter story is rather odd, starting, as it does, with Good Friday.

Good Friday, right? Surely that must be a day of celebration, marking some kind of triumph, a glorious birth - or at the very least a Hell of a birthday party. Well, actually, no. Good Friday is all about the humiliation, torture and the slow and excruciatingly painful death of the Guy Who put the Christ in Jesus H tap-dancing Christ. Go figure. Small wonder people get confused about the whole Easter thing.

Mind you, pasting your Christian holidays to pagan yearbook markers, as the early church decided to do, always carried the risk of confusing certain sacred issues. The moment you have your God born on old Wotan’s sacred tree day, for instance, you’re asking for all kinds of weird shit further down the line.

Same with combining the celebratory nailing to a stick of same God a few months later with an ancient fertility festival. Before you know it you have bucketloads of bloody bunnies digging their infernal tunnels under Golgotha hill, mucking things up – and between thoughts of sex and chocolate, that good old Good Friday message of faithful blood and gore gets sidelined like roadkill.

Small wonder so many firebrand religious types would like to see Hugh Hefner, like some Seventies’ pop star, lying face-down in the water, at the shallow end of the gene pool – and kill off the Easter bunny too. (For as the Good Book says, in Revelations; 42, Behold, I split the bunny and a demon appeared!)

Anyway, whatever your religious take or chocolate intake: a happy Easter to all. Take it away, sister Jane:

They may tell you the god is broken
into a higher life,
but it isn’t true:
the one who comes back remains,
even riveted, even pierced -
together in spring,
an always-broken god.
The knots survive in his body,
the clenched-grain scars.
And the iced winter ponds are real:
the children, skating lightly there,
feel a secret shiver
as they cross the blue places
of darkness rising-to-meet,
where the other face of the god
is looking up.

Home alone again, and I was reading an article about depression, whilst humming a Muppets song.

Schizophrenic, nous..?

The girlfriend was on one of her solo expeditions, hunting for souvenirs or face cream…, I think. I couldn’t remember precisely, since I had been watching the cat, while she was talking about her plans for the first part of the day.

The cat had been stalking the neighbour’s new Mazda - again. No idea why. To me the Mazda looked perfectly inoffensive but the cat had developed a passionate hatred for the poor car.

So, while the girlfriend had been talking about Dutch chocolate (or aromatic bath salts or something) I’d sipped my tea, looking out of the window, to where the Mazda had been behaving stereotypically inscrutable, ignoring the cat’s angry hisses.

I’d been hoping the car would kick the cat’s arrogant arse but it had not been in any hurry to oblige me in this respect.

Which was rather a pity, since the cat already had a very warped view of the world and its own place in it. The cat was, to put it very mildly, not exactly a stranger to feelings of grandeur – or grandiose delusions.

Anyway, done with the newspaper’s take on depression I took old misery guts Burton’s hefty tome from the shelf and opened it blindly – which is what I always do with that book.

Like Neil Gaiman’s Oracle, Burton talks to me in random fragments that almost always seem to make sense on some deeply solipsistic level. Again, Burton didn’t disappoint:

…and what proportion is fit for all calling, because private professors are many times idiots, ill husbands, oppressors, covetous, and know not how to improve their own, or else wholly respect their own, and not public good.

Right. I looked through the window: the Mazda was still in one piece but the cat was no longer in sight.

Prrrt…

Well, that explained why I didn’t see it outside anymore.

Prrrt…!!!

“Yes…?”

Ah, how cute: yet another partly dissected bird. If at cars you don’t succeed, and all of that.

Prrrt.

You want me to cook that for you?

Prrrt

Then you better go find yourself another chef. I’m not going to pluck or cook some damn, fat sparrow.”

“It’s a blue tit, you idiot.” said the cat, “Don’t you know birds?”

“I know the difference between a live and a dead bird – and that’s all I need to know. Now, if you haven’t come to bury the damn thing, go praise it - somewhere else.”

“Yes, boss.”

When cat and bird had left the stage through the huff side of the cat flap, I murmured:

“For every bird there is this last migration:
Once more the cooling year kindles her heart;
With a warm passage to the summer station
Love pricks the course in lights across the chart.”

Now, to take a shower or wait for the girlfriend and then take a shower together? Decisions, decisions…

Putting on the kettle for yet another pot of tea I looked outside. There the Mazda was peacefully washing itself (and looking almost cute in its florid shower cap) whilst singing Gloria Gaynor’s I will survive.

Nope, for the life of me I couldn’t see what the poor car had done to offend the cat…

Ah well, the ways of my cat were even more mysterious than those of Keith Richards in his wildest, drugs-fermented years.

Now, if only the girlfriend would return, then maybe we could forget about cats, Mazdas, dead birds or the sorry fact that there were only two more days of her visit left – and go play doctor and nurse for the rest of the day.

It’s been quite a week for music - and poetry. That is, one way or the other music and poetry were in the news.

From the music front there was much that was unspeakable. There was the story that The One who Had No Plastic Surgery (Or A Nose Job) – yes, The One Who Is Not Into Children In A Bad Way – is so ‘grounded in Vegas’ that he wants to share this with the rest of the world.

Then there was the awful sight of the ultimate king maker & puppeteer, Karl Rove, doing to rap what he did to John Kerry.
(Johnny who? Indeed.)
So, thanks to Rove in a few years’ time people may well ask:
“Rap? What’s rap?”

Thirdly, there was this depressing shot of Phil Spector, the guy who brought us the Wall of Sound - and is now on trial for having killed his girlfriend. All in all, it was not a good week for music.

Poetry didn’t fare much better though. Not with the news coming out that Barack Obama has written poetry. There’s not much that’s more depressing than politicians who try to pretend that they’re with it (or perform rap songs or play the sax) but modern, sound-bite candidates playing the philosopher king might just be marginally worse than the ‘Watch daddy make a fool of himself on the dance floor’ nerds or the ‘Sorry but how much does a loaf of bread cost?’ regular guy wannabees.

It’s childish to remind vegetarians that Hitler was one as well – so it would be equally juvenile to say to Obama, apropos his having written poetry: “Guess what, so did Karadzic.”

Oh Hell, who cares; public figures who are disgusting enough to try to get to third base with the voters by playing the Mr Oh So Nice Poet card, deserve all the cheap shots thrown at them. One can only sincerely hope that during his Muse-riddled life the big O. gave some of his books to minors.

Still, what a bloody week it was, with insane pop icons and limelight-leaking politicians, clammering for our attention.

Oh yes, but of course, and to top it all, there was also the news that very soon you might well need health insurance to even go buy a book.
Yup, some weeks it’s simply not worth the effort to get out of bed at all.

So, forgive me, for now that I’m done wishing the most interesting kinds of plagues on all sorts of houses, for me, it’s back to bed again, with a nice pot of Genmaicha tea and Neruda’s 100 Love Sonnets.

Good night and don’t wake me up before Oprah has developed good taste in interior decorating or George Bush can say The rain in Spain falls mainly in the plains without stuttering – whichever comes first.

And now, to sleep, perchance to dream of you, my love… Take me away, señor Pablo:

I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair.
Silent and starving, I prowl through the streets.
Bread does not nourish me, dawn disrupts me, all day
I hunt for the liquid measure of your steps.

I hunger for your sleek laugh,
your hands the color of a savage harvest,
hunger for the pale stones of your fingernails,
I want to eat your skin like a whole almond.

I want to eat the sunbeam flaring in your lovely body,
the sovereign nose of your arrogant face,
I want to eat the fleeting shade of your lashes,

and I pace around hungry, sniffing the twilight,
hunting for you, for your hot heart,
like a puma in the barrens of Quitratue.

There’s a 1969 movie, that does to marathon dancing what George Orwell did to bacon. From Gary Johnson’s DVD review:

Pollack uses hand-held cameras and extensive tracking shots to place the movie’s audience within the mass of speed-walking dancers who stumble and groan while their muscles scream in agony. Competitors fall to the floor, their limbs convulsing. Pollack’s camera weaves between the dancers, staring at their glassy eyes and their clenched jaws. It’s one of the most grueling episodes ever captured on film.

And all this while the M.C. screams Yowza! Yowza! Yowza!
Or, as old Hobbes, the patron saint of borderline gimmicks, talk-show hosts and born-again politicians had it:

[There will be] no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

We’ve never had it so good, they say - in the West, of course. That’s why we’ve got to the point where almost more people divorce than marry each year, more and more children are morbidly obese and fashion & life style magazines try to kill as many teenagers as possible through remote control anorexia, and where reality TV-shows are like those old lions & Christians attractions in emperor Nero’s Collisseum – serving the exact same purpose, albeit much uglier, both in terms of aesthetics and philosophy.

We live in a moral vacuum, surrounded by neon, bombarded with noise and drowning in our own waste. Or, in the words of Shakespeare’s Macbeth:

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

These days though our worst nightmares are not foretold by witches. They are brought to us through adverts, news shows and online Doom’s Day articles.

So, give it a year or so and Soul, TechFate, Moldcell and all the other Mobile Moron Muggers will offer you their latest monstrosity: the new talking and thinking, tap-dancing toss pot toy, – no doubt with a serious discount if you hand in your old brain in return.

Ending on a happier note, though: when humankind finally does get its photo taken for evolution’s scrapheap scrapbook, there might be other, much more elegant and worthy creatures who will find some use for our abandoned artifacts.

The cat had been behaving itself – so far. Okay, the little pest had run off with my tea-cosy earlier in the day and wouldn’t say where it had left the bloody thing but, as abductions go, this was one that could be easily shrugged off, unlike others one could mention or obsess about.

For now though, the beast had boldly buggered off to wherever felines go who’d just destroyed another breakfast - no doubt to do other unspeakable things of a pathologically anatomical nature. It is a cat thing: to be nature’s cordless, battery free shredder.

If mankind could tap into the boundless energy resources cats use for their petty acts of wanton cruelty, murder and dissection, Al Gore would have to find yet another job.

The girlfriend, in the meantime, had gone off to do some touristy things, involving the climbing of long-suffering towers, watching bad cases of eczema craquelé on worthy if slightly senile paintings and doing other cultural  things I tend to avoid like deserts avoid rain.

Not that I had had to do anything special to be excused from the girlfriend’s cultural city tour. Ever since I’d got us kicked out of Prague’s National Theatre (something to do with a defunct cat carrier, a half-eaten bacon & egg sandwich and a hair-trigger cloakroom attendant – don’t ask…) I’d received a universal pass card on all future expeditions of a cultural nature.

She had left me a little something to remember her by, while she was gone: a scribbled note, explaining why she’d left so early this morning – and the advice to read a certain Times online article, which introduced fifteen new reasons not to marry.

Then again, she’d also left me with another internet link, accompanied with a nicely smudged lipstick heart, three sprawling X’s and the words ‘There’s always hope.’  Talk about mixed messages…

Ah well, like Neruda wrote:

But I hear only your voice, your voice
soars with the zing and precision of an arrow,
it drops with the gravity of rain,

your voice scatters the highest swords
and returns with its cargo of violets:
it accompanies me through the sky.

Anyway, it was quite nice to have the place to myself again for a bit. Like the cat, I am a solitary creature at heart.

Unlike the cat though, I do like my peace and quiet without much bloodshed or the tortured wailing of all creatures, great and small - and unlike the cat…

Prrrt...

Oh, bugger.

Prrrt…!!!

“What do you want?” I asked.

Prrrt went the cat, who’d dropped a vaguely familiar looking piece of cloth on the floor, before it started to wash itself in a none too vague, disgustingly self-satisfied manner.

“What…?!” I asked again.

Then I picked up the piece of cloth, inspected it real close and sighed.

“Please tell me you didn’t…” I said.

Prrrt did the cat.

“If someone followed you back,” I warned, “you are on your own. I don’t know you; I haven’t seen you before – and besides, I’m allergic to cats.”

Prrrt.

“Some cats just catch the occasional, average spider, you know - the little ones; the normal ones…”

“Boring.” spoke the cat and then left through the huff side of the cat flap, to go and annoy the shit out of the rest of the world again.

“Bloody Hell.” I whispered, still holding the piece of cloth – which was, I now saw, alarmingly bloodied.

It had most definitely been in the wars.

“I do hope they managed to wrap up most of the movie before that bloody cat arrived to mangle poor Spidey,” I spoke to a mostly deeply uncaring world.

Ah well, it was something to tell the girlfriend, when she came back from great cultural height.

As news items go, it wasn’t quite up there with the death of monarchs, minor wars or the devastation of cash crop harvests but it would serve well enough as a topic to raise and digest over our tea and biscuits.

Still, my world - and the world at large - might become a much more peaceful place, if I had my next tea-cosy made out of very domestic material indeed.