Screwed Up

There is plenty wrong with the world. We don’t seem to be making inroads in fixing many of the problems, but we are fantastic at creating more.

I love films, stories, depiction of lives around the globe different to our own – ‘shapes of otherness’. But I am feeling despondent at how many of the brightest Hollywood actors die in their twenties. Drugs, pills, alcohol, guns, knives, cars. Heath Ledger, Brad Renfro, Kurt Cobain, River Phoenix, James Dean. Young white males taking on the psychosis of our age.

I worked with ‘at risk’ teens in London for a while. The same issues are there, just a bit less money to go around. Disconnected families, alcoholic parents, unemployed, glue-sniffing, self-harming kids. They can all watch TV and see this brighter world out there, where people have cars and homes and holidays, and they don’t get why they can’t have it. Don’t they deserve it? If they were prettier, thinner, cleverer, sneakier, maybe they could get out of the ghetto-ised suburbs, leapfrog their way to the States, or get a record deal, or a rich boyfriend.

And if they got there? To this dreamland of riches and fun and fame? How screwed up could they get there?

There’s no fun in studying every night, getting exams, going to uni’ while working in bars, studying more, applying for jobs, putting up with cheap clothes, a car loan, a student loan, a mortgage, studying more, getting a promotion, working late, putting work before family, squashing dreams, being practical. Is there?

I think I should set up a rehab unit in Spain, on our remote plot of land that’s truly miles from anywhere. A place to learn physical work, study the stars at night, read in the shade of the carob tree, forget TV and DVD and PSP. Actually it wouldn’t even be rehab – I don’t want to tell other people how to kick their habit or sort out their relationships. But when I was a teen and stuck inside my own head I had different options...

I spent a week at my nan’s once. Left London, got on a train with my cat in a travelbasket, turned up on her doorstep and was welcomed. She didn’t ask why. She said ‘Do you want fish and chips tonight? Would you be a love and walk down the hill to get it for us? Take the dog with you.’

I slept on a horrible Z-bed, in a room with paisley wallpaper and flowered curtains. I walked around the hills and didn’t meet another soul. I listened to my Walkman under a big oak tree. I wrote some stuff – all angst-ridden nonsense, but it removed it from my train of thought and cleared my head. After a while I went back to my bedsit in London, and cleaned the kitchen. Even though it wasn’t my turn.

Got a minute?

After

There are moments
pinned to you as latent engrams
when life coagulates in one drop of blood
water sweat semen tears ink

her
hand wore a raven ring
the room intense with cold
when she took the whole pack of morphine pills the 400mg calculated by
current weight of 7 stone (but does that include the lumps)
and the tiniest globulous sip of water
3 days before
my first birthday without her

sweat
trickles down my freckled breasts it drops on the tiles I’ve mopped badly
so that the grime line is visible under the steel refrigerator doors
where I retrieve the bowl of Nectarines Aux Armagnac for the portly businessman
with the lechy colleague who asked me if I was aware of my own destiny
sniggering at the waitressy reply I give
since it would belittle me to talk philosophy
with a man who spat in his hors d’oeuvres so his partner would not try them

I touched
her shoulder and wondered if we would hug today
since her husband declared he no longer loved her or their two year old son
but preferred Natalia who had long straight hair and looked like
the photos of our mother in her sixties mini-skirt and kohl
who made jewellery for women to wear whilst sleeping with their husbands
while she was slumped into rolls of fat breasts and belly and my hand didn’t span her upper arm which used to look like Kate Moss’s
protruding from her ‘pulling dress’ with spaghetti straps from Jakarta
and the only tears she shed were for
boys who looked like girls
or her mutilated grey Siamese

dropping the pizza
off the edge of the perfect white plate
to stare at the amniotic fluid pooling under my table on the laminate flooring you laid by hand on your cracked knee for three days with Brad
while you looked for the watch timer you forgot you were wearing
and I stared at the black interior of a holdall containing the doll sized nappies
I doubted I could fasten around the waist of a doll let alone a red faced squalling thing with heart and lungs and pearlescent fingernails
that you would hold in your arms two hours later
while I investigated the hospital shower stall
and watched paint red blood
cascade down my inner thighs
to swill with water down the Art Deco floor grill

drops
from a sable brush
with a thick handle shaped like a carved chair leg
to make sweeping calligraphy flow inkily across the stretched cotton frame
of the T-shirt that Caisa hung in her flat in Göteborg that she sent the photo of
her wearing when we saw Ulrika outside the museum on Götaplatsen
and I stood in the window next to some Europeans and thought will I always feel English unable to see the future where my children speak Valenciano
and I read the digital European news emailed to me because
I need to find out if they’ve printed the article about our battle to save the Carrascal Mountain from urban developers
or if my poem’s in print
on that forum

on a tree stump
near the London to Cambridge railway line
in the shade cast behind the corona glare of a station lamppost
his penis constricted by the black mesh of my fishnets I refused
to remove, his penetrating finger adorned me with the scarlet blush
of my first orgasm
caused as much by the sight of his purple prick dripping
as by the hoot of the train
and the backdraft whoosh
and the stars coming into view
after.

The best game in the world?

Reading the Inner Minx’s blog-site the other day (innerminx.blogspot.com) I discovered this wonderful game. Put your name and the word ‘needs’ into Google and find out the secrets of life. For instance, I discovered that:

Penny needs to switch meds. (Really?)
Penny needs a Bra – Bad. (How do they know these things?)
Penny needs your help to be able to continue on her antibiotics and to get her serum (Bit of a theme here...)
Penny needs a home as she was found on the side of the road completely feral (I do apologise and I’ll never drink Strawberry Daiquiris again.)
Penny needs to be supervised (Ask my boss)
Penny needs to stick with Spanish films, because that's what she does best (Ok I’ll try)
Penny needs surgery as the screws holding her wrist together have worked loose. (Blimey, better quit this typing then.)

Go give it a try. Blog-sites are addictive for the wonderful insight they give into other people’s lives. It’s the ultimate voyeurism. My favourites right now are theshamelesslionswritingcircle.blogspot.com - reallybadmovies.blogspot.com- athomedaddy.blogspot.com - singularcake.blogspot.com and wherelizardsrun.blogspot.com- although www.thebloggingtimes.com and www.blogher.org are also fun. Course, I slipped my blog in there. Us bloggers are shameless.

Monthlies

So it seems I am only capable of writing a blogpoint once a month now. Following a predictable trend, I wrote regularly for about three months, then in bursts, and now I'm lucky if a sanguine moment occurs each month. But then my full-time work overspills into my weekends now, and the three girls are spiralling off into the ether with their plans and crazes, and I get dragged in their tailspin from time to time, plus Joe, plus the needs of the house....

Let alone the fact that when you write for a living, finding something unique to say that you haven't already put in print elsewhere, occurs only at unreliable erratic moments, like 3am, when the laptop is sleeping three floors away downstairs in the dark.

Hmm. How will I ever finish the three/four novels, one filmscript, one play? In fact, do I even want to finish them? Isn't their ongoing process the best bit about writing?

I can see why some writers only make it posthumously.

What Next?

So they've invented see-through frogs. I must be having a menopausal limber up because the idea of a 'team of scientists' (bastards! It's always them, isn't it) deciding jointly to invent frogs with transparent skin, makes my skin crawl. Presumably these frogs will be highly susceptible to changes in heat and light which may damage their exposed internal organs. Well, I presume that's why we're not all see-through, isn't it?
And why clear frogs? Because they will not have to be dissected to be useful in experiments. Scientists can simply watch their organs, to see whether the disease they have been given is shrivelling them, or causing heart failure, or respiratory problems.
How handy – now they can avoid problems from those noisy anti-vivisection protestors. Never mind that the frogs may be suffering from life with see-through skin.

This triggers a memory of reading on the internet about the outrageous Eduardo Kac. Kac (pronounced Katz) is a Brazilian-American artist who persuaded a French laboratory to create a rabbit crossed with jellyfish genes that glows green in the dark. ‘Alba Bunny GPS’ then became an art exhibit. He wanted to get her out of the lab afterwards, but the mad scientists refused. Perhaps he wanted her in his hallway to save on lamps.

Now don’t get me wrong. I’m all in favour of avant-garde artists. And I LURVE crazy ole scientists (when they are doing something useful for the rest of the human race) but what is going on here?? After five minutes on Kac’s website, my brain hurt from trying to comprehend his ‘Plant that grows solely on light emitted by a computer triggered by art-lover’s and the unfathomable ‘bee doing a bee dance’ idea. His ideas are fantastic. And I suppose only by putting them into practise can he claim them as ART. But I felt the need to scream “Was the frog thing your idea too?”

So what is the logical conclusion of all this tampering? I feel my next sci-fi novel coming on. ... “I would like to thank my mother, Eduardo Kac and the godlike Margaret Atwood when I accept this Oscar for the screenplay of Green Rabbits and Clear Frogs: The Movie.”

Seriously, can anyone surmise where the world is going with this ‘livestock-could-eat -livestock Mad Cow theme? Will genetically tampered vermin roam the sewers of Madrid, happily glowing in the sludge? Will it be see-through babies next, to make it easier to spot when they swallow a pentop?