So sleepy today. So very sleepy Monday non-madness. Everything is on slo-mo. The clock is going backwards. My lunch break went into reverse. I think things are beginning to melt, starting with my eyeballs, moving onto my digits.

Yesterday I read a book in one day. I’ve never read a book that quickly before. I had got up with the intention of writing, and did manage to edit a short story, but I couldn’t get into my novel so I decided to do some research instead. I’m writing about an imaginary city. There are a lot of books written about cities, some fiction, some non-fiction. But when I started reading Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino (and I had read Calvino before – The Cloven Viscount – a wonderful, bizarre, surreal short story – so I should have known I’d be impressed) I found I just couldn’t put it down. And then, about three quarters of the way through, it became an aim, or perhaps an obsession, to finish it.

Check out this freaky beautiful art by Ray Caesar:

Contact lenses. Check.
Green eye-shadow, black eye-liner, black mascara. Check.
Extra long white fish-net scarf. Check.
Black beads, green ring, green earrings. Check.
White hat. Check.
Black and white stretch dress, long black skirt. Check.
Stripy knee-high socks, black boots. Check.
Inflated sense of boho-self. Check.
A constant need to pee. Check.
Fear and trembling re.the great white void that is motherhood. Check.
Slightly bewildered look on face. Check.
Coffee-rush. Check.
Bag containing:
	Make up. Check.
	One book of fiction: The Krewthedral by Ross Brodie. Check.
	One book of non-fiction: Postmortem, How Medical Examiners 
Explain Suspicious Deaths by S Timmermans. Check.
	Four own short stories to edit. Check.
	Two Sein submissions to read. Check.
	One ISMs submission to read. Check.
	Keys, purse and other miscellany. Check.
Will to live. Check.
Will to write. Checkity check.
A hint of excitement at the thought of watching Hostel 2 tonight. Check.
Baby in belly. Check.
 
And I’m ready to face the rest of the week.

Crazy for the Jam I am. It comes with being away for a week and returning with a need to go through all my old cassettes. Also been listening to L7. VERY loudly. J thinks I listen to some terrible shit. But, you know, the baby needs to come out listening to punk and new wave and general roarrrrr music, methinks.

Spent a few days down in Dartmoor with J’s folks. It’s a bleak, grey, desolate, freezing fog kind of place. Beautiful. The frost hangs from the trees in white splinters; Christmas lights on the roofs of houses blink in the far far away. The newspapers tell of escaped beavers on the rampage and attempted burglaries. And, sadly, a pub that burnt down. Built circa 1450, burnt to a crisp December 2008. Like most buildings down there, it had had a thatched roof. There was nothing of it left except the outer wall and some smoking rubble.

Oh oh, and the nightclub in Bangkok that burnt down. I saw footage of discarded blackened shoes etc. Apparently the revellers at first thought the flames were part of the show. It’s horrific. So very sad.

There are obstacles always. There are always obstacles. I tell myself life is about overcoming them. That’s what life is or should be about. Because otherwise you’ll be caught in the mire and the shit will ooze up around you until you can’t breathe and it’s all in your nostrils and your ears. It’s always me not wanting to compromise. It’s always about the writing that keeps my sane, and the world that wants to drive me mad. It’s about not having the time. It’s about the day job. It’s about obligations. It’s about this fog that has descended. The smog between my ears. Can’t think straight most of the time, can’t concentrate etc. My sister laughed and said yep, it’s your age and the pregnancy. And you’ll never get it back. Ha ha ha. And I wanted to puke because what am I without an ability to think in some kind of linear pattern? A pianist with fingers missing? A colour-blind artist? Beethoven was deaf but it didn’t stop him. Jean-Dominique Bauby was left paralysed by a stroke. But it didn’t stop him creating an alphabet through a pattern of blinking, and then ‘dictating’ a book, before he died. So what the fuck am I moaning about? I hate whining on here, but at least in doing so, I am not whining at people and I can carry on acting like everything’s okay, like there aren’t days I wonder how to rid myself of the baby, or how best to take my life. It’s hormonal, is it? Or is it just a fear of the beyond? It’s an unwillingness to accept a new identity as ‘mother’ which will overshadow this particular persona as ‘writer’, the one I have spent at least half of my life trying to hone.

I cried, in a room at my mother’s, but soon had to pull myself together when I learned my step-dad had fallen and couldn’t get back up. He’s half-paralysed, but we might have been able to pull him to a chair. Except that I am unable to bend and lift because of the baby and my mother is too old to have to do that. Also, his arm is not in it’s socket because he has no feeling in it and the weight has made it fall out. There was talk of amputating it a few years ago but I guess they decided against that because an operation would be too risky. So we had to call an ambulance out and they were able to slip this inflatable chair beneath him and lift him slowly til they were able to get him to his feet. A brilliant piece of kit, it was.

Still, yes, there’s nothing like illness or pain or discomfort, or simply seeing the things other people have to go through, to get the nitty gritty into perspective. I am a fool and a wench. I need to learn to compromise. I need to retain my goals and remember these things are simply obstacles and life is a challenge. I have to learn patience and give-and-take and I have to learn to say ‘no, this is MY time now’. And I have to remember how fucking lucky I am.

Jaysus, where did all that come from?

Happy Christmas or happy piss-up or happy time off work or whatever it is you celebrate at this time of year. I’m going to enjoy the peace and quiet as it’s the last child free Christmas I’ll have. Holy fuck!

You must watch this 1913 stop-motion animation on YouTube. It is the cutest thing ever. The insects’ Christmas:

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=Ls2WtJakgo0&eurl=&feature=player_embedded

Have a good one xxxx

Sein Sein Sein Sein Sein Sein Sein and a partridge in a pear treeeeeee

http://www.kissthewitch.co.uk/seinundwerden/3_3/index.html

Also,  review of the Bone-Bodiced, the poetry/prose collection by the lovely Juliet Cook and myself. Contrary to what it says at the end, I do have a couple of copies left here in the UK.

http://dogmatika.com/dm/books_more.php?id=3375_0_3_0_M

I had a dream that my life was in danger. My bag was stolen, and I retrieved it, only to discover the thieves were then hungry for my blood. The rest of my dream was spent on the run. John and I weaving between streets and shops and alleyways, until I suddenly remembered I needed to buy Christmas wrapping paper, so everything was halted while I went shopping for some.

I guess I have Christmas on my mind. That may be because I bought my first present yesterday. I’m a little behind this year!

Check out this news story. This kind of thing doesn’t happen in real life does it? It’s very Shakespearean. Or perhaps something Agatha Christie might write – actor’s fake knife swapped with a real one so he slit his own throat in a performance. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/dec/11/actor-slits-throat

I’ve been after a wedding dress. My short story collection is to be called The Bride Stripped Bare as an homage to Duchamp, and I have decided to get John to take a photo for the front cover of me, heavily pregnant, in a wedding dress. With props such as skulls or knives or some such.

I just won this one on ebay. I went for something a little bit hideous, and one that could hopefully stretch over my belly. If not I will slash it to fit!

There is an interview with me here at Poetic Diversity: http://www.poeticdiversity.org/main/index.php about Sein und Werden. Read it at your leisure. Read it at your peril. Read it if you’re bored. Or don’t read it at all. S’up to you really. Innit.

I heard on the radio this morning, read in the paper this afternoon, that there is a documentary on TV tonight about euthanasia. Specifically it is the filming of one man’s assisted suicide in the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland. It will be the first documentary of a death. I don’t think I’ll be watching it. It has caused some controversy of course. The man’s wife has had to defend the programme, especially to critics who think it is some form of ‘reality TV’.

The parents of a 23 year old man who was paralyzed from the waist down after a rugby accident have been let off sentencing for the Suicide Act. They too paid to fly him over to Switzerland for an assisted suicide.

I’d do the same, if I had a loved one in the same position. I don’t want to watch it on TV though.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/north_yorkshire/7774652.stm

I went to the ‘babylab’ this morning. Working for a university I get to hear about various studies being conducted, and volunteers needed. For this girl’s PhD, women in their fifth month of pregnancy were wanted for a study in maternal nutrition. Voila. No monetary gain but any kind of research like this (ie. that’s not likely to have me foaming at the mouth or growing extra digits) can only be a good thing.

With a name like Babylab I was expecting to see shelves and shelves of foetus-filled jars, flat-faced, short-limbed little bodies pressed up against glass. Or perhaps tiny tiny babies so small you could bite off their heads in one go, geek-like. At least I thought there might be babies in cages pressing levers that dispensed food, wearing headgear that emitted electrical currents, babies with eyes forced open and perfume-filled droppers poised and ready…

But, as usual, reality was different to my imagination and I just ended up answering questions about my diet. Ah well. Reality can bite me!