Friday 23rd of February, 2001
Very tired - for various reasons I didn't get to bed until half-eleven last night.
(Half-past eleven! Way past my bed-time! Until a month ago I was a 2am person! 4am at weekends! How did I get old so quickly? I even bought slippers! Take me to my rest home!)
Sitting not particularly inspiring, since it was partly sleep-by-other-means. Also, I was troubled, somewhat. A situation beyond the scope of this journal that I am incapable of improving. I want to be helpful, but am reminded of Robert's Aphorism on Helpful People.
Perhaps, if a Heinous Jerk is intent on polluting a Spiritual Neighbour's Metaphorical Water Supply, one's first duty is to keep one's own MWS clean, not merely out of selfishness, but to be available with clean (metaphorical) water.
Maybe a better Sitting than I thought.
An invoice has been returned by the Return to Sender service ("Delivered to you by Royal Mail" - well, duh! But I didn't want them to deliver it to me). It appears that I sent it to a wildly out of date address. Doh! Reprint and re-address the envelope.
Now I have to go ... gulp ... outside! Where the scary people are.
Oh well, I need more fruit, anyway.
One thing about this non-meat lark - you end up going to the supermarket a lot more often.
Moderate excitement! A package arrives from Alapage.com (a sort of French Amazon.com) with videos of Les Shadoks (an animated cartoon of my childhood and that of one other person of my acquaintance and nobody else, as far as I can tell) and Jacques Brel live at l'Olympia in 1966. No sign of the Anna Domino CD that I ordered. Not charged for on the invoice, so presumably they had none in stock, or perhaps it's out of print. Chiz. I wish I spoke French.
Interestingly, although the Brel video is called Quand on n'a que l'amour, it doesn't actually have that song on it. Many other fine tunes, though, including a Ne me quitte pas from another concert.
Of course, this means I have to turn the television on.
Spend far too long fixing the link at the top of this page that says 20/2/01. Now it works. Is that self-referential enough for you, PoMo-Boy?
Supermarket. Another half-destroyed pizza for lunch (maybe my strategy is wrong. Maybe having a pizza strategy in the first place is asking for trouble...).
Feedback on the radio - essentially, a collection of minor complaints about Radio 4 are converted to publicity puffs for the network. Any reference at all to a programme is used as an excuse to replay large chunks of it. Even the minor complaints are never satisfactorily answered. Gah!
Although I am a lot calmer since I haven't been paying attention to the media.
The magnificent Shorty's Lament by the Residents has come on the CD player. This is a fact worth sharing. The Residents (featured in the February issue of The Wire, which I was just reading, so there's synchronicity there) created some of the most extraordinary music I have ever heard - a lot of it seems to set out to be offensive, not by using obscenity but by such a wilful employment of ring modulators and quarter-tones and out-of-tuneness that only the maddest and hardiest can stand it. They know exactly what they are doing - that is where it is offecsive.
"Is anybody driving at all?" quoth The Resident on vocals. Precisely.
Shorty's Lament is one of my favourite Residents tracks, built around an early Synclavier loop, with a generally apocalyptic tone and ethereal girl chorus. I have tried unsuccessfully for nearly twenty years to pin down exactly what it is about (it's probably very simple - I am notoriously obtuse on these matters. I used to think ELO's Mr Blue Sky was about drugs).
Followed by Nat King Cole. Make of that what you will. And then VROOOM VROOOM by King Crimson.
Then I upload this.
("Mum! 'Es going all self-referential again!")
And then nothing, particularly. To sleep early, because I'd like to be quite fresh tomorrow.
Early to bed and early to rise make a man miss Friday night after-pub TV.
Which is a worthwhile end in itself.