plasticbag.org

I’ve had my conversation, and it went – I suppose – as well as could legitimately be expected. You hope for more, you expect less, and you pray that you don’t get kicked too hard. Today’s been generally hectic, but for the first time this week I feel like I’ve actually accomplished something. I wrote my first review for the BBC Film website: “Fly Away Home” [Video | DVD]. I will of course let the world know when it’s up on their site. As the first non-survival-related activity that I’ve managed to complete for quite a while, I can’t help but experience a slight upturn in my spirits.

Dear Mr Quayle, It has come to my attention over the last few months that you bear a certain amount of animosity towards me. As we know from our studies of ancient texts, vengeance stimulates vengeance, and without an external party to steer one towards justice and equanimity one can – I’m afraid – only reciprocate. But this does neither of us any good. Can you not look around you at all you have and, from such a position of success, take pity on those of us forced to battle each day for whatever crumb of self-respect we can muster? Can you not take strength from the size of your home, or your salary, or from your acknowledged potency, intelligence and wit and – recognising that you have won any perceived battle between us – be gracious? Yours, tongue firmly in cheek, Tom Coates.

I’m feeling unhelpfully nervous this morning. I have an important conversation to have which I want to be completely relaxed for, but I’m not. It’s an absurd conversation to have – it won’t get anything accomplished (or at least I doubt very much that it will) – but I decided that I needed to have it, and here I am. I’ve got to do it now.

What I did last night: I’m going to let Davo do all the hard work of explaining what happened, so I can just say ‘thank you’ to him and Nick H. for indulging me and momentarily pulling me out of my current funk.

I finished reading The Music of Chance in Bristol on the weekend. It’s one of those books about pushing your life all around you until it collapses and you’re finally left with nothing of any value. It’s an intelligent pornography of self-destruction, later debased by books like Fight Club and Invisible Monsters. I heartily recommend it.

On repression: If you don’t have anything good to say, then don’t say anything at all. That’s how the old saying goes, is it not? What if there are things to say, good things, but you can’t concentrate on them? What if the one thing that you can’t talk about is the only thing that you really want to talk about? What if it pushes everything else out of the way? What then?

I read a lot of Freud when I was at University. Repression is what you do when the impulse or desire or memory or truth bubbles up from within you, but is stopped from entering the conscious mind by the super-ego – the part of the brain that stops you becoming the slave of your basic impulses. The thought remains immanent – just below perception, and bubbles up in strangely symbolic dreams and eruptions of irrationality in your everyday life. Like cryptic, confusing posts on a weblog. Like writing that doesn’t go anywhere.

Weirdest coincidences (2): One of the guys working at Arehaus at the moment is one half of the circlemakers.org crop-circle collective that won Guardian Site of the Year a while back.

OK. I really have to get my fat arse in gear, so I’m going to kind of write this in a hurry. Warning: Life Recap [If you are not interested in hearing about what I spend my time doing then stop reading this post (indeed this site) immediately.] Everything is kind of happening at once at the moment. I didn’t think I was going to be working today, but then yesterday afternoon someone at Arehaus asked me to come in for another half-day. Which, you know, is a nice extra piece of money. But it is just the latest addition to a whole mad spectrum of weird shit that’s been occupying my head. From two separate friends wanting me to go to birthday parties tonight and tomorrow night, to a friend in Bristol who has persuaded me to go and visit her instead of going to those parties, to my attempt to rationalise two separate companies working practices, to my father ringing up with advice from my brother’s god-father (an accountant), to my mother ringing up this morning asking if she and my brother could see me today if they travelled the hundred miles from Norfolk, to the builders waking me up with loud incomprehensible conversation on the fourth floor of the scaffolding that is directly outside my bedroom window, to the performace of Romeo and Juliet I went to see last night, which my flatmate worked on, and which wasn’t very brilliant, but had lots of hot men with few clothes on, to the kebab I ate (chicken) which really didn’t work well, and the cold I can’t get rid of, and the fact that I don’t have any dry clothes and have to pack and get to work by midday having paid in two cheques, and gone to the laundrette, to all the bills I can’t pay, and all the ones I don’t want to pay, and all the things surrounding me that I don’t understand and find confusing. I need a social secretary.

In which Tom continues his attempts to rip off every single last piece of content from interconnected.org: So when we were down the pub the other night, and I was being all crapulent and morbid, Matt was busy thinking about the possibilities of interaction between Ultimate Bulletin Board software (as seen on the Barbelith Underground) and Usenet. This is why he will come to rule NewMediaLand and I will sink further into drunkeness and iniquity. But I wouldn’t want people to think that he wasn’t there for my pain. Oh no.

While I’m at it, I may as well go the whole hog and steal his link to this fascinating article on The Great Divide between the US and Europe, along with the Metafilter thread that accompanies it. You know, because I can.

According to the BBC, scientists may have identified genes that lend a higher predisposition towards suicide. An old friend of mine killed herself a few years back. We’d lived together on and off for two years and been friends for four or five years. Nothing anyone did seemed to help her, and her life seemed like a kind of unending torment that she just couldn’t see the way out of. I really don’t know if it makes her death easier to accept if the cause was her genetic make-up. I doubt it would make it easier on the parents either, although perhaps they wouldn’t blame themselves so much. I don’t know.