Entities.

You do know that when I talk about entities that might be angels or aliens or spirits or just some guys that may or may not exist but nevertheless I direct weblog posts towards, you do know I mean entities that might be angels or aliens or spirits or just some guys that may or may not exist but nevertheless I direct weblog posts towards, and not actual people people, right?

Not everything is about you.

In other entirely nonworksafe but if you didn't already know that before you came here you deserve to get fired and never find another job again ever news: The Ministry for Depressingly Stupid Referrals has seen fit to drop this into my reluctant lap. The answer, my curious chum, is No they don't. Not as a rule. You could get the individual in question all addicted to some expensive drug, and then maybe they'd do what you're suggesting if you gave them a lot of the drug or lots of money to buy the drug. Or if you held someone they cared about to ransom and the ransom was doing that thing you just asked about, then yeah, maybe they'd do that thing you just asked about. Or if they were in some desert place and going to starve to death and the only person with food wanted them to do that thing you just asked about, then again, yeah, maybe.

The point I'm trying to make here is that the answer to your question is NO. Under normal, everyday sort of circumstances, a normal, everyday sort fo woman will not do that thing you asked about. Most women would be all "EWWWWWWWW!" The fact that you asked about it suggests that you're all messed up about women in some serious way, and that you should get help. Or just stop eating paint. Either way, learn to use a search engine so that you don't bother me with this kind of faith-in-human-nature-wrecking thing in future. I want to go on deluding myself that not everybody is messed up in the head, and you're making it really difficult.

I'm gonna start making my search referrals public, I think. Then people who know how to play with the internet properly can find out where you live and make all your shoes melt from h4xx0r powers.

Took the stupid quiz again.


paranoid


Which Personality Disorder Do You Have?
brought to you by Quizilla


That's better.

"Hitler sexier than a space ninja"-- you people

I am disturbed, but somehow unsurprised. I knew your heads were full of that yecchy stuff at the bottom of the soapdish, but now I have PROOF. You all fancy Hitler and I DISTAIN you.

borderline

Which Personality Disorder Do You Have?
brought to you by Quizilla

WHAT? How dare they! BPD? I'm a paranoiac, people! A paranoiac with a tiny side order of schizotypal! Eveyone knows I'm a paranoiac! People who've only known me for a couple of minutes know I'm a paranoiac! I'm good at paranoia. How dare this stupid quiz suggest otherwise?

I bet the person who designed the quiz hates me and wanted to make me all grumpy.*



*SEE?

"Take that, rat munchkin."

Spooky.

Really, I have got to get out of the habit of getting all excited every time my magick works. The Powers the Be have just delivered, big time, and my adrenal glands are being all weird about it. They're bouncing up and down like a couple of puppies.

Y'know the other day, when I mentioned to the Entities that I was thinking of selling my evil dollies on line, and that it would be nice to have a way of taking pix of them? Well, guess who's getting a digital camera in a few weeks' time. Turns out that my Mum has a spare one going begging, which will be mine when next I see her.

Which brings me to my next bit of news: I will soon be back in the UK for a spell. There's this wedding in Ireland, and a birthday in London, and some other stuff. I'll be around from early- to mid-September; details of pub crawls and sundry debauchery will be announced through the usual channels as and when I can be bothered.

It's been a funny weekend. There was this huge storm on Sunday morning, which kept popping back for curtain calls all day long. I gave the park a miss. Feel a bit guilty, but I don't imagine that very many people would have turned out anyway. Still looking for safe places to fly-pitch during the rest of the week. Somewhere the police wink at such mildly illegal behaviour; somewhere untrammelled by licened traders who are likely to cut up rough if they observe a distinctly unlicenced MC setting up shop; somewhere inhabited by other fly-pitchers of a gentle and non-territorial bent. Somewhere with lots of rich beadwork fetishists. I haven't found it yet, but I will search on, bold, resolute and unfaltering, until the Eldorado of flypitchers appears before my weary gaze. Or until I get all hot and fed up and decide to go and sit in the internet cafe for a bit.

Anyway, I'm off to Google for pictures of harpies and stuff.

(PS: Thankyou for the help, spooky invisible people. Much appreciated.)

"...this rich, stupid, superficial, selfish woman, who sneered at Jews and blacks in an upper-class accent, was fawned on by the establishment right up to her death. ". (Excellently vituperitve article on the recently dead Lady Mosely).

Jeeze, how stupid are these Grauniadistas anyway? Don't they know that it's just not cool to bash fascism anymore? All the really hip kids are into it these days, y'know.



*Incidently, have you noticed how certain phrases have the power to lift your spirits, whatever your mood? "Wow! It's a lovely day-- Let's go to the beach!", "Great to see you! Now, what'll you have to drink", and "the late Lady Mosely". I'm just going to sit around saying that to myself for awhile. "The llllate Lady Mosely." Mmmmm.

Idi Amin dies.

According to the article, President Yoweri Museveni's spokesman called Amin's death "good." Nuh-uh. Not good. Good would be if it had happened a bit sooner, like before he murdered about 500,000 people and totalled Uganda's economy. Dying in bed aged 80 after you've perpetrated the crimes that Amin perpetrated isn't "good".

Here we go again...

From my site tracker it looks like people have suddenly started emailing my blog's URL to each other. Why? What've I done this time? Go away, you freaks.

If your're reading this because a friend sent you here, stop speaking to that person immediately except to prank-call them in the middle of the night. Every night. For at least the next year or two.

Apart from the prank calls (which should be vulgar and distressing), you must never, ever, ever have any contact with them again.

Is your pathetic mutant brain full of flaccid nerves?

Attentioooh, look at that...

I have the attention span of a brain-damaged gnat. I go online to check my email, and half-an-hour later I'm doing a quiz to see what colour my pants would be if I was an anime character, or something.

Anyway, that's not what I was going to go on about. What I was going to go on about was this: I'm trying to get abducted by aliens again and it's just not happening. (That's trying again, not being abducted again. This would be my first abduction.) I've tried re-tuning my temporal lobe as a communications device, but either a) nothing happened b) the aliens didn't want to tell me anything, or c) the aliens want me to do stuff like pop out to the shops or make a cup of tea.

I want to write a story about an alien abduction for this SF webzine, and I don't want to just cobble one together from existing sources. If I was back in the UK, I'd obviously hit some out-of-the-way place with a reputation for that kind of activity. You know, airy mountains, rushy glens, etc.* However, I'm not up to snuff on Spanish folklore... really must try and get a handle on that.

*Yeah, I knopw that's fairies, not aliens. They didn't have aliens back then. The fairies had to handle that whole side of things till the aliens got here. Ever noticed how nobody gets stolen by fairies anymore?

Stalling.

Stayed home today to work on a new line for my stall. I'm hoping the new design will appeal to that all-important 20-something male stoner demographic. Last Saturday I bought a bag of polished black pebbles, and I've been making them into pendants by putting a blob of epoxy putty on the top with a hole for the string. I've modelled shapes into the putty (faces, hands, leaves, spirals etc) and when it's dry I'll add some colour. They've mostly come out okay. I plan to make some more with runes cut into the putty. I mean, who doesn't love a good rune?

Still need to buy some thongs for them tho'. Mmmmm... thonnnngggggg.

I'm rapidly running out of doll parts. I need a steady local scource of cheap spoof Barbiealikes to dissect. I'm thinking of making doll part jewellery (for that all-important teenaged goth chick demographic); by my reckoning, doll part jewellery has been over so long that it's now retro.

I'm doing other stuff too, like buying cheap notepads and painting the covers with gouache (you say that gwash, apparently). I've got some acrylic varnish spray to give them a durable finish. I'm going for a scattergun approach, finding out what goes over and what doesn't.

This whole situation both rocks and sucks. On the downside, I'm fed up with the no-job-having, and I want the stuff on my stall to sell and SELL NOW, goddammit! On the upside: money's tight but not a huge problem yet, and I'm rediscovering a whole slew of skills, abilities and drives that I'd almost forgotten I had. I'm in a fairly high-energy mode right now, fuelled, I belive, by the fact that I'm actually making stuff again. What with one thing and another, the arty-crafty side of things had to go on the back burner over the last four or five years; in retrospect, that may not have been such a great thing. Never mind. Spilt milk, now.

I really hope this make-and-sell thing could work out eventually. It's definately me. I think that one of the best things you can hope for in this life is the chance to express yourself, your beliefs and ideas, through the way you live-- something that few people ever get the chance to do. Also, if I could make a living (or even half a living) doing something creative, it seems likely that my head would be in a better place writing-wise.

Which brings me back to the writing.

Ah, yes. The writing. Hoom.

I've been coasting a bit lately. I haven't been contributing to my writer's group, I haven't been giving The Novel any love, I haven't been sending out stories to magazines. There was that virus, then I got all caught up in the making of stuff, and what with one thing or another I've not been working as hard as I should. Need to get back on the horse. Firstly, new word-per-day target: 500 words, min. Secondly, and rather painfully: blog posts no longer count towards the daily target. Blogging sometimes gives me a false sense of security, makes it feel like I'm on top of the writing when... well, really not. I've touched upon the perils of work-flavoured nonwork elsewhere, and sometimes blogging can fall into that category. This measure should help draw a line between really writing and just braindumping.

Hot enough for ya?

Today I have been mostly wandering aimlessly around Barça. I love wandering aimlessly round Barça, but damn! It's hot. Hot hot hot. Mind you, it's apparently hot back home in London. This is sick and wrong. London should not be hot.

The evil dolls are looking good. I'm making a freind for Beauty Queen: a red devil doll with horns. Next up is a murderous housewife poisoner. Then I thought about paintings-- when I was, like, 15 or so, I used to really like doing these stylized, almost kiddy pictures of mythical creatures (harpies, dragons, stuff like that) in watercolour. Very bright, clear colours, pretty much as they come out of the tube, unmixed: cerulean blue, chrome yellow, madder rose. Fine lines of black Indian ink. I plan to do a few of those, little ones, about the size of bathroom tiles. Spray 'em with acrylic varnish, see if they sell.

This is all very strange. I seem to be going back in time, skillswise. Once I started doing the beadwork all these other abilities, which had been allowed to atrophy because they weren't deemed important, gradually started to creep back. All well and good, all well and good. I'm currently thanking whatever providence it is that watches over the likes of me that I didn't put all my eggs in the electronics basket. You really do need more than one sort of skill these days, or you're screwed. (The next time someone sneers at your "lack of focus", reader dear, just ignore them. Or kill them. Actually, kill them. Slowly. Especially if they use the phrase "Jack of all trades and a master of none", the sure sign of a ridgid-brained git. Have you ever noticed that people who use that particular cliche never have an actual trade? They can't make tables or put in windows or mend boilers, or anything useful. They're always careers advisers or personnel officers: futile and toxic. Really, kill them I'll give you an alibi.)

When not wandering aimlessly around Barça, I've been ensconced in the mercifully air-conditioned bowels of the internet cafe reading eBay tutorials. I reckon I could sell some of my dollies on eBay, and maybe some other stuff too, but I have no idea as to how one goes about it. Looks fairly easy though.


Which brings me to my latest begging letter to the nameless and incomprehensible (and possibly completely nonexistant) entities:

Hello, your spooky intangiblenessess. Guys, I'm going to try really really hard with the art and crafts stuff like I think you (or your bosses, I don't know how this works) want, but you have to help me along a bit, okay? Firstly, help me find an appropriate outlet for my stuff. This could be a craft fair or something, perhaps. The eBay thing might be a good idea, but I'd need a way to take pictures of my dolls and put them online-- preferably fairly cheaply. I'm not saying that you have to give me a free digital camera (it'd be nice, but I'm not that crazy), just point me in the direction of a scanner or something.

Thanks.

P.S.: I'm trying to do the right thing here, but you know I get sullen when you don't throw me a bone once in a while. Remember that time I spent a whole year being a hardcore skeptic? Yeah.

Please read. Matter of life and death.

Plums has read my mind, or summink. Was just going to post on this very same topic:

Amina Lawal, a 30 year-old Nigerian woman, sentenced by a Shari’ah court to death by stoning, has once again had her appeal adjourned. Amina’s appeal will now be heard on 27 August 2003. According to the registrar of the Shari’ah Court of Appeal of Katsina State, the hearing could not take place because there was an inadequate number of tribunal members to hear the appeal. Two of the judges were reportedly serving on ad-hoc elections tribunals, constituted after general elections in April and May 2003.

Amina confessed to having had a child while divorced. Pregnancy outside of marriage constitutes sufficient evidence for a woman to be convicted of adultery according to the new Shari’ah-based penal code for Muslims, introduced in Katsina state.

Yes, you read that right. Amina Lawal is going to be stoned to death for having a baby. I'll repeat that for the hard of thinking: Amina Lawal, a breathing, feeling, thinking, human being, is going to be buried up to her neck in the ground and get rocks chucked at her head till she dies because she's had a baby.

Please sign the petition. It'll take about two seconds and your input may help save Amina.


Sorry; that's probably put a crimp in your lunch break, hasn't it? I get all worked up over stuff like this all the time. Sometimes it gets written up; sometimes it's so horrific, so painful to even think about, that it seems wrong to put it up here. I know that I should, but I don't want to keep ripping everyone's guts out all the time, y'know? Thinking about creating a seperate blog for things like this. Just put up the petition links here, along with a distress warning, and then a longer commentary on the subject at hand on the Scary Blog. Hmm.

Should've picked a different title for this baby, maybe. Every day in every way, I feel more and more like an lefty anarchist version of Rorschach.

The fine art of mutilation.

Okay. It's Sunday, and as you should all know by now Sunday is stall-in-the-park day. I've been busy over the past week, making kewl things to sell.

I've made a ton of those little daisy rings, because people seemed to like them so much. Need more of the smaller sizes, though. I also finished a few wire trees. They're well smart, if I do say so myself as shouldn't, especially the smaller ones. They looked a bit bare so I started hanging little bead thingys from the ends of the branches, and now they look proper.

I also started making some messed-up zombie-type dolls. I bought four or five of these 60c spoof Barbies, and I've been rearranging their smarmy faces with a Swiss Army knife. Eminently satisfying. My favourite is Miss Psycho Killer Beauty Queen, a pageant runner-up gone bad with bloodstains all down her dress and her rival's arm in her handbag. I'm also making a proper Zombie, but some of her green paint is still sticky so I might have to save her till next week. Going to try for €15 a pop for these babies, because they're a lot of work.

Can't belive I didn't buy the dolly with the suitcase, though. Or the miniature kitchenware. WTF is wrong with me?

Braaaaaaaaiiiiinnnnnnnnnssssss! Get'em while they're hot.

(Via diepunyhumans.com. Not so much work-warning as lunch warning.)

6/8/45 8:15am

On this date 58 years ago an atomic bomb, known as "Little Boy", was dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima.


Hiroshima

Survivor's stories

Hiroshima Peace Declaration

Ra.

Having spent the best part of a decade taking the most exaggerated precautions against the sun (for tedious medical reasons that I can't be bothered to explain here) I decided, on arriving in Spain, to begin desensitizing myself. I started slow and careful: limited exposure, heavy sunblock. One of the first things I did was visit a pharmacy for advice. I was going to go for a 15, but the pharmacist went off into a long and (to me) largely unintelligible lecture in which the words "mas pallido" and "blanco" cropped up with alarming regularity. I left bearing a bottle of paediatric sun-cream and feeling a bit dispirited. A certain bearded individual thought it was all verrrry funny, especially when I decided to put some of the stuff on while we were taking the metro.

I've also been charging a little sun pendant that my Mum gave me as a solar talisman, in the hopes that I might start absorbing some of the energy rather than being fried like a big streaky rasher. It's been working pretty well, too; I've been able to move onto factor 15 and I don't always have to wear my shades. I even bought a few little crop-tops. I was responding quite nicely to the sunlight. It feels like it's shifting my consciousness somewhat-- I'm definately in a different mindstate when walking around on a sunny day. (Stop muttering about sunstroke. It's not sunstroke. It's a magickal altered state of consciousness. Shut up.)

'Course, I couldn't just carry on with the softly-softly approach, could I? Oh, no. I had to get all cocky. So, last Sunday I go to the park and sit there with my display of jewellery from 2 till half-eight. I mean, I did put sunblock on, I just didn't reapply it. Because I'm all hard and sunproof now, and I can sit in the Spanish sun for six and a half of the hottest hours of the day.

Do not mess with Ra, people. Ra is not to be mocked. Ra sees you mock him with your teeny crop-top and your one application of factor 15 sunspray, and Ra smites you. He smites you between the waistband of your skirt and the hem of your top with the dread Curse of the Stripey Back, and you rue your temerity. DO NOT MESS WITH RA!

I did sell a couple of daisy rings tho'. Daisy rings seem to be a bit of a winner.

Booooored now.

Repetition, man. It rubs you raw eventually. Even the lightest caress, repeated for too long, will begin to chafe.

Got stuck in normal human consciousness all this week. Felt weird, grey, nasty. Linear, linear, linear. Hard to think outside the box; the box is everything, the box is me. Starting to pull out of it now, thanks be to [insert deity/angel/superhero/forgotten servitor grown fat on your obliviousness]. Sick of the same old minds in the same old grooves, the same old songs: We've shiny-new, you're old hat/we're wise and mature, you're young, dumb and full of spearmint gum. Shouldn't let it make even the smallest blip on the radar, but some people should know by now: when you slag off a set of people that includes me, you slag me, yeah? You get that, yeah? You get that you didn't give me or anyone like me a magickal Slagging Exemption Chitty before you went off into your latest hissyfit? And incidentally, could you please make up a new song? All I'm getting from you are remixes, and the tune wasn't that great in the first place.

So, having got over the sickies enough to take an interest in the world once more, it's off to look for inspiration. No inspiration. Not even a little bit. The Dalek squawk-- "IM-IT-ATE! IM-IT-ATE!" resounds louder and louder. People aren't even looking outside themselves for stuff to rip off anymore, they're just looking at their old shit and regurgitating it, a copy of a copy of a copy, dwindling and losing colour with every iteration, until all that's left is a blank surface onto which all those vacuous minds can broadcast the one thing they really want to see: Their own faces, staring back, love in their eyes. Narcissus, kiss your clone.

(I'm finding text a little awkward today. I need something else, something where I can branch and extend without losing cohesion. A 3-D wordprocessor.)

me=

TEACORE.

TEA.

CORE.

Your homework for the coming week:

EVOLVE or DIE
EVOLVE or DIE
EVOLVE or DIE
EVOLVE or DIE
EVOLVE or DIE
EVOLVE or DIE
EVOLVE or DIE
EVOLVE or DIE
EVOLVE or DIE
EVOLVE or DIE
EVOLVE or DIE
EVOLVE or DIE
EVOLVE or DIE
EVOLVE or DIE
EVOLVE or DIE
EVOLVE or DIE
EVOLVE or DIE
EVOLVE or DIE



(There will be a test.)

Sick.

I'm sick. Woke up this morning to find that I'd lost my voice. Currently dragging around with a temperature and many achey bits. Been a while since I've had a fever, and I've been hoping to get one; I belive that running a temperature now and again is good for the body. There's some research to indicate that fever can protect one from cancer. Fever is the breath of Sekhmet, a hot wind purging the body of poison.

Which doesn't make me any less fed up, of course.

Last night I got a sign from the entities. I found a tarot card in the street near Placa Catalunya; The Chariot, to be precise. One of the local fortune-tellers must've dropped it. Lurid's been encouraging me to try reading the tarot for money, and that night we'd had a lengthy discussion about it. I give good readings, but I haven't done any in so long, I feel nervous about it. Plus there's the practicalities-- I don't speak enough Spanish to read for people yet.

WTF?

Should prolly do a post about yesterday in the park, but right now I've only got one thing on my mind.

Why can't I get a job? Why? WhywhywhywhywhywhyWHYYYYYY? I'm getting turned down for everything! Every damn thing! The stupid burger joints don't want me! The stupid shops don't want me! The stupid bars don't want me! The stupid cafe in the stupid station doesn't want me! Screw you job-giving people! I hate you! You suck! All I wanted was some shitey little job washing up in a kitchen or something, and you can't even let me have that? I hate you! I hateyouhateyouhateyou! You stupid uptight jerks!

And nobody's buying my stupid jewellery! I work really hard at that stuff and the guy next to me with a big pile of mass-produced crap made at gunpoint by child-slaves in Indonesia which which looks exactly the same as any other piece of mass-produced crap made at gunpoint by child-slaves in Indonesia is doing a roaring trade. Karma be damned: next week I'm just going to go down the wholesalers and buy a bunch of mass-produced crap made at gunpoint by child-slaves in Indonesia. You want crap? Fine! Here, have some crap! Have a big pile of crap that looks just like the next pile of crap! Look, you can have the exact same "unconventional" earrings that all the other "unconventional" people are wearing. (That's how you know you're unconventional, you see.)

You know what? Screw this.

Screw walking around town all day, screw tweaking my CV, screw pouring my energies into a bottomless pit of futility, screw having to go home every day and tell my boy that he's still gonna have to support the five-and-a-half-foot long leech that's stuck to his bank-book, screw flypitching, screw snotty tourists who come over and peer at my stuff and look like there's a bad smell under their noses. Screw this whole pointless existance.

And most of all, screw you.

Oh, and I started a thread on my board with a review-y thing of May.

Make up your own title, you bone-idle gits.

Hrmmmm. Been slack on the blogging lately. Not had much to write about; everything that's been happening lately is happening inside my head.

The language exchange night went fine, and I shall definately return next Tuesday (hopefully dragging Lurid along this time). Still can't understand nine-tenths of what everyone is saying, but it'll come. It'll come.

Having a bit of a crisis of confidence about the writing. I feel I lack the proper discipline; I'm still punting out stuff that's poorly developed, flawed, often containing glaring errors in grammar or spelling (which I somehow manage to miss until the piece is already winging its way to some webzine editor's inbox). Don't know what's wrong with me; how'd I get so damn sloppy? Repetition, cliche, typo, roaming comma, repetition, missed apostrophe, Attack of the Spurious Adjectives, repetition repetition rgrgrgrgrgrhhHH...

Mordant Moral Faliure: Beserk
Mordant Go for the eyes, Boo! Go for the eyes! RAGHHHHHHHH!

I'm trying to put together a couple of articles at present: some kind of travel thing with which I hope to temp the local English language publications, and something on teenage boot camps, which I will either punt out to emergencyPARADIGM or the new and improved Disinfo... that's if I ever get it finished. There's just too much data, and it's all really horrific data too. I read this stuff-- the articles, the court transcripts, the messageboards-- and I run out of places in my head to put it all. I start wanting to puke, or cry, or hit people, or call down the wrath of Freya, or just run out into the street and start punching the ground because of the complete impossibility of doing anything about these terrible, horrible places that torture vulnerable young people for money. Some reporter I am, huh?

But I've got to persevere. The more articles that are out there on the Web, the greater the likelyhood that these clueless rich tosspots will stumble across a little smidgin of truth inamongst all the glossy brochures.

A lot of people reading this will probably be thinking "yeah, well, the boot camps are nasty but what about all the other stuff? Iraq, Liberia, war, famine, torture, death, cash crops-- how come you've fixated on a bunch of rich American kids?" And they'd have a point, of course. The thing is... I know about all those things. And I don't just know in my head, I know in my gut, too. I'm haunted by them. They flutter round inside my head: the ghosts of all those people who have died and will go on dying in my name, who are enslaved in factories and on plantations so that I can buy cheaper goods. And I do what I can to change that. I write letters, I boycott this brand or that brand, I pass on information, I march, I do whatever. Every so often I give up (because I know I can't change anything, who am I? I'm nobody!), but I always begin again. You have to keep going, keep trying, even when you know intellectually that it's all pointless. It's not about what you do or don't change, it's about being someone you can stand to look at in the mirror.

The boot camp thing, though... that, I feel, could change, and change rapidly. There should be a change in the law, there should be legal protection for the kids concerned, there should be an end to the criminalisation and pathologisation of adolescence, sure, but you don't need those things to make the boot camps and the house-arrest programmes and all of that disappear. The way I see it is this: the boot camps are a product. All that needs to happen to kill a product is for people to stop buying that product.

('Course, then you've got to worry about what they buy instead...)

Okay, you ethereal types...

Heads up.

I'm off to my first ever language exchange night at a certain bar in about half an hour, and I'd like to make a couple of requests puhleeeees.

1) Give me my GUMPTION. I must and shall have GUMPTION.

2) I do not wish to get chatted up. This happens less frequently than it used to for I am an old boiler and I have divested myself of my crowning glory. And I dress funny. However, there are still some who won't take the hint.

3) I would like to meet some fun people, with whom I have stuff in common. Preferably these would be vaguely arty folk who could help me with path-y stuff.

4) I flat out DEMAND... that you accept my gratitude for your help today, including those nice bits of cheap fabric remnant you helped me find, and for pointing out that want-ad in the sushi bar. Thanks, guys. Or girls. Whatever.

Making stuff.

My consecrated hematite Wealth bracelet broke the other week. It was just hematite chips on elastic and the elastic snapped when I was having a beer in the Placa George Orwell. (Remind me to stop consecrating cheap jewellery in future.)

I saved all the bits, but I'm not sure what to do with it next. I was just going to restring and reconsecrate it, but something stopped me. I suspect that it wanted to be free. Bloody iron ore-- these metallic doobries are a bugger for getting ideas.

So I plan to redesign the bracelet. I'm going to use most of the hematite chips and some other suitable materials and remake it from scratch. A few of the hematite chips will of course be incorporated into my next batch of beadwork, to be offered for sale on Sunday. So that's another chore to look forward to this week.

Stupid magick.

Mmm, swords.

Oooh, they're so shiny and pointy! I want all of them. Lovely lovely pointy swords. Mmmmmmmm. Swords. Mmmmmmmmmmmm.

Also I want a flowing cloak and a swordsman's shirt, and some nice pointy boots. Some personal mist that would swirl about me on demand so's I could always make dramatic entrances would be good, but the costume people don't seem to sell that. I already have a long-haired bloke to stand next to me and look all brooding, so that's a plus.

That's...

Countess Junior Grade of The Flobee Hair Suction System, Mordant Carnival, L.C.S.W, to you lot.


(Random name & title generator robbed off of Solonor)

Heh.

Quote:

It's like saying something like, "Well yeah, I sent that mind eating demon after that guy, but it's ok because I practice white magick and he practices black magick. He does bad evil nasty things and I'm a happy fluffy fairy bunny witch who does good deeds, like helping old women cross the street".

Trijhaos made me eject fluid from my nose again. It's not fair.

Another open letter to the Entities.

Okay, guys. I think I've finally got myself pointed in the direction that you want me to be pointed in. Doing the jewellery, check. Making the ickle pritty wire trees, check. Keeping my eyes open for cool stuff to nick from skips, check. You have my gratitude for helping me sell that necklace on Sunday.

No, I'm not being sarky. I didn't really expect to sell anything, so the necklace was a plus. Thanks. You guys have been great, and I'm sorry that I needed so much poking to get me on the path. What can I say? You knew what I was like when you took the gig.

Now then. In order for me to keep to the mission, I need a little more help. Obviously I need to sell more stuff than that, but what I need right now-- like, tomorrow-- is a hint as to what I can be doing money-wise for the rest of the week. Can't just sit around from Monday to Saturday, hoping that this Sunday will be the charm.

So I'm asking you ethereal types once again: Help me out. Introduce me to someone who can point me in the right direction, show me where I can set up shop. See if you can't find me a job that works for you. Above all: give me the gumption I'll need to make the most of the chances I get.

Throw me a bone, eh? I can't go on like this, no money coming in and all that. It makes my stomach hurt.

The lost afternoon.

Inbetween those last two posts there should have been a little something on how I had a really great time on Saturday. Lurid and myself went to the Parc Güell to meet a 'Lither and a couple of said 'lither's mates. We had a great time, eventually fetching up on the beach to drink sangria. It was loads of fun, and I really hope they enjoyed it too.

Sold out.

Got to the park about 5pm, stayed till 9. Sold one (1) necklace. Ho, hum.

It was nice in the park tho'. Sort of like a mini-festival. There were jugglers, loads of really good jugglers, people playing guitars, a human pyramid, stands selling burritos, lukewarm sangria, herbalized tortilla and suspicious chocolate cake, people walking round with cool boxes ("AguacocacolacervecaAAAAA!") , cyclists, unicyclists, bemused tourists who'd come for the geological museum, and drums drums DRUMS. The drums were awesome beyond words. There were little knots of drummers all over the place, creating this thick sonic tapestry. It drew you in, made you part of it. After a while I found I was humming happy little made-up tunes to the rhythm of the drums.

I really want a drum now. And a sword.

Anyhow. I'm not totally gutted about the whole "one necklace in 4 hours" thing. It was my first time out and I reckon that with better presentation and a wider variety of stock I could do loads better. Hey, if I can sell one necklace when all I've got's an old pillowcase with my stock Sellotaped to it, what couldn't I do with a proper display?

Been thinking about how I might vary my stuff a little. I reckon that I should try and go for the wannabe mage market; pentegrams, chaostars, planetary symbols, etc etc. Also, I'm really good at making those kitschy little wire "bonsai" trees, so I might do two or three of those. Then there's "found object" sculpture; I used to really enjoy making semi-arty stuff out of crap that other people had chucked out. Not saying it'd sell, but it might get people interested.

But this is only a Sunday thing. What about the rest of the week? Well, getting a licence to sell stuff here is pretty much a nonstarter, but there's still the street-theatre option. Admittedly I'm no good at juggling, unicycling, dancing, or playing music, but I'm really really got at staying dead still. No, really. I used to be a life-model for a beginner's art class. I can hold a pose for forty minutes straight. So I'm thinking, human statue. Hmmm. Of course one would need a suitable costume, but I'm pretty inventive in that regard.

I would like a costume with a sword. A big shiny pointy sword. Then all you sword-having people would have to stop laughing at me.

If I had a drum and a sword I would be invincible, and nobody would ever tell me to file anything again.

...mark out the losers in your office so you know whose opinions you can safely ignore.

fridgemagnet puts his finger on one of the main reasons why I really hate working with other people: you're all a bunch of know-nothing, style-over-content bozos. I hate working with other people because work, like justice, must be seen to be done. So what if you've been slaving in the file room since 7:30am? Your upline manager doesn't get in till nine-thirty, and she won't see you. Worse, if you're so busy trying to put some order to the chaos that her lousy management has created that you don't come up for air till 10:30, you'll have to put up with the smarmy bint asking you if your alarm clock's broken. Attempting to reason with her is a waste of time. She'll just nod and smirk. Most people grasp the concept of object permenance in infancy but not your upline manager, oh no. You don't exist if she can't see you. Someone who does no work but makes a lot of work-flavoured noise, on the other hand, will be showered with praise and get promoted over your head and then get the perm posting they've been fucking promising you for the last three months which is the only reason you've been coming in at 7:30am and RGHGGHGHGGGGGFUCKINGBASTARDS!

I really hope this fly-pitching thing takes off. Much as I want a job, the thought of working with you losers again fills me with nausea.

Yeah...

Still jobless and still broke. You got it.

Didn't go into town job-hunting yesterday. Thought I'd stay at home for once, give my Castillian some love. Spent most of the day going through this book of grammar excercizes and listening to Spanish telly. I prefer DVDs-- it's easier to follow what's being said if there are subtitiles because I read Castillian better than I speak it.

I think I'll do the same again today. I've got an SF novel which I keep meaning to work through with the dictionary. I'm going out later, but not till this afternoon.

Okay, post over. You can get back to making snide comments about people who whine about their lives and then don't try to fix them now.

I still don't have a job. Why don't I have a job? This is beyond merely depressing or annoying. This is Kafkaesque, is what it is! Give me a sodding job! I've lost count of the number of CVs I've handed out, calls I've made, streets I've walked down, temp agencies I've signed up with, and nothing. I don't even get a rejection letter or anything. Just... dead silence. It's not even as if I'm setting my standards too high. All I want is some crappy little minimum-wage thing, mopping floors or waitressing or machine-minding. This sucks. I go into town every day, I check the noticeboards, I check in with the managers of the bars that have my CV, I do everything I can think of to find work. And still nothing. Nothing. What the hell is wrong?

Having been denied legal employment, I've decided to try fly-pitching. No joy there, either. Went to the Parc but everyone there was asleep. Put my stuff out but nobody bought anything. Then there was this big police lorry driving around, and the park keeper kept wandering past, and I had to keep stuffing everything back in my bag. (If they catch you fly-pitching here they take your stuff off you and you have to pay €100 to get it back.) In the end my paranoia got the better of me and I went home. I'm going back on Sunday, because I've heard that everyone fly-pitches there on a Sunday. Nobody gets busted because there's just too many people: buskers, jugglers, traders, dope-dealers, all sorts. Sounds like fun.

Bloody furious again.

This time it's Magical Aqua that's got me all riled up. Not, I hasten to add, at the author, but at what she's being put through by her L.E.A. (Local Education Authority).

Magical Aqua's author, Lucy, is a teenaged girl who suffers from M.E. From what I read in her journal she's fighting the disease tooth and nail, but she can't really attend school. This is because her symptoms (which vary over time but often include severe pain, fatigue to the point where she can barely sit up for any length of time, insomnia and nausea) are too severe.

But physical disability should be no barrier to a young person's eduaction, right? I mean, there's laws and things, right? This is what you pay your taxes for, right? Wrong, according to the relevant L.E.A. They've been stringing this young woman along since 2001, failing to provide home tuition, failing to explain why. Same old story: "You're someone else's problem, we've lost your files, it's not my department, blah blah blah." I suppose they were hoping that the problem would disappear when she hit 18.

This is a disgusting way for a bunch of supposedly responsible adults to behave. I had a lot of contact with various L.E.A.s and their so-called education advisors when I was a kid and I have nothing good to say about them. I'm sorry to see that the callousness and incompetence that I recall is still alive.

The BabyInk thing was a hoax.

Whew. Now I don't have to go all the way to America just to kill them.

Just time for a quickie...

I still don't have a job.
I am sick of non-job-havingness.
If I do not get a job soon I will release a mutant strain of athlete's foot into the El Corte Ingles zapateria.

This is your last warning. Job me, you CV-eating gits, or things round here are going to get... itchy.

There was supposed to be a post here.

And the links had proper names and stuff. Then blogger ate them. Make up your own damn post and your own bloody titles. Then go and boil your collective noggin.

http://www.anotherealm.com/

http://www.darkecho.com/darkecho/links/4zines.html

http://www.ravenelectrick.com/writersguidelns/index.htm

http://www.theroseandthornezine.com/

Search refrerrals: Yet another reason to hate your putrid guts.

"macaque choking pictures". I kid you not. Someone came to my blog and tracked stupid all over the floor again.

Oh, and the person who came here looking for "barcelona sex shops": did you find any and where are they?

More lousy parents.



Hey, mums! Is your offspring insufficiently adorned for your taste? Is slathering your kid with designer lables no longer doing it for you? Don't feel that Junior expresses your personality adequately? Never fear, Baby Ink is here! Real permanent tattoos for infants as young as 6 months!

(link via kookymojo.)

Come close, people, while I explain something to you know-nothing, more-money-that-sense-having, baby-torturing bloody morons: A CHILD IS AN AUTONOMOUS ENTITY! A person. A small, smelly, annoying, mewling, puking, noisy person, true, but a person nonetheless. Not a billboard, not a prizewinning extension of yourself, not a punchbag, not a bargaining chip in your mindless, pointless battles with your mindless, pointless ex. Get that concept into your self-absorbed brains before I have to come down there and SMACK it in.

God, I hate Homo Sapiens. Pollution, Boot camps, Guantanamo Bay, more pollution, nukes... you're a bunch of shaved apes who haven't leared not to shit where they eat and devour their young. No wonder I'm going bonkers-- I've had to share a planet with you freaks for nearly three decades. I wish you'd hurry up and kill yourselves.

More psi fun

Further to yesterday's entry: I will use the Recorded Experiment setting instead of constantly chickening out and using the demo setting just because I intened to make my scores public. It doesn't matter if this doesn't work. It's not like everyone's going to dance round me singing "You've got no psi powers! Nyahh, nyahh nayhh nyahh nyahh!

This is a game. Fun. Playing. You remember fun.

Psi fun.

Having been unable to climb up off my psionic plateu, and being eager to have some kind of external, non-subjective record of my acheivements (if any), I've dug up this site that I was playing with a bit last year. It has a number of retropsychokinetic games you can play, which also function as experiments. If you so choose, you can have your results included on their database. I'm going to try and do a little every day (mostly using the bell-curve game), see how I get on.

The RetroPsychoKinesis Project

More on Tranquillity Bay and sundry other kiddie gulags.

The more I delve into this subject, the angrier I get. It's a nightmare: unimaginable stories of brutality, physical, emotional, sexual and spiritual abuse. Nobody should have to go through these experiences, but these are bloody children. The worst thing some of them have done is talk back to their folks.

Please take a few minutes to visit one of these (especially grant's blog) and read the articles, comments and the court transcripts.

grant is collating links and info here

mudshow thread here, now longer, rantier and linkier

Barbelith Underground thread here

If anyone reading this can give me some pointers as to how I can get involved in fighting these places and the people that run them, if you know of a campaign or can tell me which authorities I should get all activisty towards, please get in touch. Email me, tag me, leave a Shout Out, or post to my board.

Rejection.

Got an email rejection last week, for a story I'd sent to Bloodlust UK. I mention this because it was a really, really good rejection letter. It was both helpful and courteous, explaining clearly and concisely why the didn't feel the story was right for them, what they liked about it, and what they didn't like. In my long career as a literary nonentity, I've recieved many rejections and I would give this one an eight, maybe even a nine. I almost wrote back to tell the editior how impressed I was with the quality of the rejection, but felt that I risked being taken the wrong way.

To give you some idea of what I look for in a rejection letter, here's a few pointers:

If you haven't read the story, don't pretend that you have. Create a standard letter explaining why you can't read new stuff at the moment.
Do not stick the boot in. You can ruin someone's whole day quite effectively with a simple "thanks but no thanks." You do not need to use profanity.
"We didn't feel the story was strong enough" is a lame comment. Make up your mind what's wrong with the piece and say that, or use a standard letter.
Above all, don't give up! Sure, you'll take a few knocks along the way, but persevere. Someday you'll be able to write rejection letters like a pro!

Tranquillity Bay

Lazy rich screwups farm our their child abuse.

Can't be bothered to physically assault and verbally humiliate Junior yourself? Don't worry! When you're rich, you can get other people to do it for you!

Lengthly rant over at thee mudshow, here.

(Link ponced from fridgemagnet).

Sun, sea, and salty goodness.

You should see the Med under the brilliant afternoon sun! Green-blue, almost glowing, sparkling, with tiny white boat sails off in the distance. It looks like a dream ocean, like something from the imagination. Beautiful.

Myself, Lurid Arcive, and M. all spent the weekend in Sitges, a seaside town round the coast from Barca. It was excellent. We arrived on Saturday afternoon and were lucky enough to find a room in a fairly pleasant little hotel (spaces are limited at this time of year). Having dumped our stuff, we had a slightly overpriced meal at the Pic Nic cafe and then went for a dip in the Med. Haven't been sea-bathing since I was a kid, so I had a great time, sploshing around and trying not to get my glasses knocked off by the more boisterous waves. The beach was crowded and there was quite a bit of litter floating around, but otherwise the water looked pretty clean.

After salting and sunning ourselves satisfactorily, we all sloped off down the shops and stocked up on beer and fizzy drinks. (Not touching the minibar). Then we adjourned to the hotel, where we sat around on the balcony, lolling on sun loungers and jawing idly as the sun got lower and the air cooled. Come the evening, we set off on a bar crawl. We started out at Parrots (gaybargaybargaybar), then just kind of sauntered up and down, stopping at various points for beer, food, and in one case a slightly disappointing ice-cream. The best part of the evening for me was walking along the rocks with an overpriced six-pack just after midnight, then drinking beers as we watched a little flotilla of catamarans set out onto the black waters, their white sails ghostly against the sky. I don't know what they were up to-- perhaps there was some kind of licence-related night sailing requirement being fulfilled. It was a rather poignant sight.

We passed a rough night, thanks to the minestrations of the local gnats, then got up and fought the other residents for scrambled eggs and coffee. Then we went and flopped around on the beach, chugging back fizzy water, lemonade and beer, and snacking on peanuts, cheese and brioche. Myself and M. developed a hopeless crush on one of the drinks sellers, a handsome fellow with long dark hair and muscular arms. Yum. (Can the self-loathing, XYers-- you blokes are nice to look at.) Swam. Basked. Re-applied sunblock. More swimming. More bask. More beer. More suncream. Zizz. More swim.

Eventually we decided to call it a day. We pootled around the town a bit, then headed back to the sticks to nurse our sunburn.

So long, Sitges. We'll always have... Parrots.

*Crickets chirp*
*Frogs croak*
*Tumbleweed tumbles*
*Bell tolls*

Aww, c'mon, guys.

And then Monday happened, and M. went to live somewhere else where she didn't have to sleep on the floor, and today I went into town, got hot and tired, completely failed to find a job, and somehow had a tenner nicked.

Bah.

Bars.

So one of my bestest freinds is in town-- M., who lived upstairs from me and Lurid Archive back in Dryrotsville. She's staying with us, which is very cool, and since she used to live in Barcelona herself she's been showing us some of her old haunts. Last night we ended up wandering the maze of tiny streets near the bottom of the Ramblas, looking for her old local. It was one of the coolest bars I've ever been in: tiny, with green paint on the crumbling walls and red on the low ceiling. The light came from dim lamps with red fringed shades, and from a bright red fluorescent tube overhead. The only consessions to the lush July heat were the open door and two oscillating fans. They were playing Bjork on the crappy CD player. It was awesome.

Not, however, as awesome as the next place we went. It was one of the secret bars that are apparently scattered all over town. I'm surprised that M. was able to find it, even after getting some vague directions off the barman; she'd only been there once before. We walked up and down the street a couple of times, trying to suss out which door to knock on, as guys in yellow overalls hosed down the narrow roads with powerful jets of water. There was almost nothing to indicate that this place was any different from all the other quiet, shuttered homes and businesses in the area, except for the very very faint strains of music coming from inside. We knocked tentatively on the door, and were admitted by the rangey blonde barwoman. Tracking water over the black and white tiled floor, we trooped inside.

The building smelled like Dryrotsville used to smell at the height of the Leaky Bath Catastrophe: damp and musty. We stared at the sculpture hanging over the bar, a three foot long tangle of chains, gas masks and other oddments, while the woman served us three sweating bottles of beer. There were only a couple of other customers. We brushed by them and went to sit in the back, a tiny snug with old, flyspecked mirrors on the walls. Not all the walls were plastered; one was still bare, the great rough stones gleaming with moisture. The light was so dim I could hardly see, coming as it did from only two fittings. One of the bulbs had been covered with streaky reddish paint to subdue it, and was further obscured by a lampshade that seemed to be made from an X-ray of someone's pelvis. The stools and tabled were all quite heavy, and mostly looked to be made of iron. (I tried to take a rubbing of the engraved metal rim of our table, but it didn't come out. Stupid biro. I'm getting some proper brass-rubbing crayons.) On one wall hung a pair of mannequin's legs, clad in black tights, clunky pinkish sandals and a length of (yes) heavy chain. A crucifix fashioned from a lifesize baby doll smirked in one corner, an inverted cross visible on its sooty babygro. We couldn't stay for too long, unfortunately; we left around half-midnight to get the bus home. I was by this time very tipsy and excited, in that jangly overtired way.

It was a great night out.

Stop shoving.

Further to my continual and ongoing rant about no job and crap job and why don't the Powers fix my life and whine and sulk et hoc genus omnes...

In a recent comment, angel said: "Have you thought of making creative/interesting stuff to sell at markets?"

And I said: "I've been thinking of making beadwork jewellery to sell. My freind is in town and she says there's an art/craft collective here-- could be just the break I need."

Her contact with said collective arrives in town in about a week. I shall be pushing actively for involvement in said collective. Unfortunately most of my art/craft stuff is in storage back in London, so I have a week to throw some bits together. Should be time enough-- my language course finishes today so I'll have rather less on my plate. I reckon I'll make a few pieces of bead jewllery, just simple stuff. If I have time I may whip up some small paintings, but that's less important.

I am starting to think this was the direction that I've been pushed in for the last few months, if not longer. Synchronicities abound. I've frequently considered doing something like this but didn't know how to go about it and lacked the confidence to really try. Also I generally don't meet that many arty-crafty people-- it's hard to do things in a vacuum, without input from others.

And yes, the writing is still my number one priority. But I need to find a way of earning some money, like, yesterday, and I'd prefer it if I could earn said money in a way that doesn't make me go totally mental please.

Bog off.

I'm getting rid of that stupid site tracker. There's never any good news there. Most of the people who come here are sad sacks looking for "some pix of a dog and a rilly rilly FAT CHICK like going for it", or "some pix of a CAR CRASH all with blood and dead guys and stuff". I mean, you want to look at that stuff, that's your wossname, fine, have fun, but learn to use a bloody search engine. You see, a search engine is not a person. It does not understand hilarious colloquial names for parts of the human body. Furthermore it does not respond to threats, or to repetition; typing the same query again but with capitals, exclamation marks, added profanity and/or extra instances of the word "beaver" will avail you naught.

And that's not the worst of it. Having polluted my referral logs with your fetid imaginings, you keep coming back. You run exactly the same foul and moronic search again and again, and you keep coming back to my blog from said foul and moronic search. What is going through your minds-- do you think a weblog will suddenly metamorphose into a bestaility and car wreck site if you look at it often enough? Are you doing this just to bother me? I hate, loathe, despise and pity you.

Except for the pity part. I lied about the pity.

I've changed my mind.

Things are fun, today at least, and I am appreciating every lucious moment and hurling my fun-having into your face like a big squishy Pie of Fun, but they (things) are not good. If things were good, I would have a job, and my job would be to write stuff.

I have no focus and I can't finish anything and right now I can't start anything and arrgggghhh. Argh argh argh. Why the hell did I decide to go into electronics?
Why, having gone into electronics and having found it impossible to find work in the field besides checking for shorts and dry joints, did I persist in banging my head against that brick wall?
Why am I here, now, in this life?
What the hell is wrong with me?
Why do I have writer's block all the time now?
How come it took me so long to get a grip on what I needed to be doing?
Why can't I come up with one teeny-tiny workable idea?
Why does everything I write seem so cheap and trite an derivative and somehow rootless, like bad fanfic in search of a fandom?
Why does everything take so damn long when the days go by so fast?
Why doesn't anyone tell me what the rules are until the game's over and I've lost?
Is my life really over, am I really washed up at 29?
What is it with people like me, why do we do what we do?
Why do we take the shit that we take?
How come, after a total of six years of studying (not to mention various short courses in this, that and the other), I can't earn more than the minimum wage?
How come it's still poxy jobs with poxy money and poxy H&S violations that have so far left me in near-constant pain, cost me much of the feeling in two fingers of my right hand and will indubitably cost me more the longer I keep doing jobs like that?
Should I just chuck it all in and join the Exodus Collective?
Where can I find a job doing what I'm good at?
Why, when I can paint, draw, write, sing, solder, read circuit diagrams, knit, sew, spin, dye, conduct minor household repairs, dig, plant, pot on, take cuttings, sweep (floors and streets both) and use many popular software packages, can I not find someone to pay me to do one or a combination of those things?
Why are half the things I'm good at several hundred years out of date?
Why aren't there any jobs out there where I can actually use the skills I have rather than having to learn a bunch of new and frankly very boring skills on the fly so I'm underperforming and I look like a moron and I never get promoted or even given a long-term contract?
Why does everyone keep telling me to go into IT?
Do I look like I'm going to enjoy a long and productive career in IT?
How come I'm still searching for work that is so far below my skills level?
How come I can't even get the work that is so far below my skills level?
What is my skills level?

Do I even belong in this world?

Where do I go if I don't?

Happy Deathday!
Your name:	mordant carnival
You will die on:	Saturday, December 13, 2014
You will die of:	Food Poisoning
Username:
Created by Quill

But I'm so young and beautiful!

Oh, no. Wait. That was some other chick.

acidexia is back.

And here, too.

I am pleased.

Busy, busy, busy.

Sooo....

Lurid's now been back from his travels for a week or so, and since the big 'puter is currently in an advanced state of fuckedness (the back plate is live and the hard-disk is dead) we're reduced to fighting over the laptop. Hence the bloglessness and the lack of Evil on thee mudshow. Sorry, guys; hopefully things will get back to normal soon.

Energy work: plateu-ed. Not a problem, though-- this always happens with any developing skill. Just need to work steadily on and not a) get discouraged or b) start imagining results where no results are.

Novel: bloodybuggeringbastardingnoveldamndamndammitARRRRGGHH.

Sundry other writing: Okayish.

Castillano: Fuego mal, arbol guapo.

Job: May be some reception work at a hostel in town. Or there may not. We shall see.

Went up Montserrat today. Was lazy and took the cable car, rather than walking. My excuse is that I sort of overdid it in the pool* yesterday and my legs were still a bit stiff. Didn't participate in any religious goings-on, but I did queue up for ages to see the Black Virgin. She is a very eerie icon; I felt some kind of energy radiating from her, not inimical or threatening in any way but completely unlike anything I've ever worked with. Didn't pluck up courage to touch her. Maybe next time.

Now I'm back in Bagsnatcher Central with L.A. Not sure what we'll be up to later, but it's certainly lively in Barça today. There are Harley Davidsons everywhere (it's the centenery, y'know), and we passed an embryonic Pride happening on the way here. Might try and hunt down a Goth club, or might just head on home and chill out in the pool** for an hour or so. Life is quite undeservedly gooood.




*The free open-air swimming pool for residents of where I live.
**Nothing to add, really. This footnote exists purely to rub in the whole pool thing.

Thinking aloud.

I finally did it. I shaved off the rattail. Never again will anyone (coughGaneshcough) be able to accuse me of having a mullet. I was shaving my head and it was taking so damn long, it was such a hassle, and then I got to the back. I was thinking about how I was going to have to shave round the stupid thing and what a fiddle that would be, and I just went rghghghghh. Sides which, I'm thinking of getting a tatt on the back of my neck, which would be hidden by the hair. The skin there has been asking for a tattoo, just like the skin on the side of my head used to beg before I got my rose done. It's a nagging physical sensation, as if someone was holding their hand out over that point, not quite touching it. When the ink is in place then contact will be made, the circuit completed. I belive the thing my skin requires is an angelic figure of some kind. I'm searching for the right image.

My novel is trying to kill me. This is the hardest thing I've ever done. I know it's all there, all the componants are in place, waiting within the empty page for me to find them, yet... I keep getting lost on the way. What the hell happened to my imagination? Why can't I think anymore? And then I want to abandon it, and I can't: it throws up some enticing image or concept, and I have to go back. This thing will have blood from me before it's done, you mark my words.

I love the view from my window. Just now I'm watching some people (an adult and a kid?) flying a big kite in the field across the way. It's one of those huge ones like a parachute; must take a hell of a lot of strength to hang on to it.

Sidebar issues and a terrible confession.

What with the move and various hard-drive crashes and the fact that it's cheaper to surf from Bagsnatcher Central than to use the dialup, my access to my bookmarks is somewhat limited these days. I find I actually need to keep my sidebar something like up-to-date if I don't want to spend half my time Googling stuff. Yeah, I know some of the links are dead. Sometimes it's just because I know that X has a link to Y's new place and I can just go via their blog instead; sometimes it's because I still feel sad and angry that Y got harrassed out of blogdom by some shithead stalker and can't quite bring myself to remove the link. Sometimes it's because I knackered my sidebar and had to go back to an old copy which had the dead link in it. And sometimes it's because the deadlinkee was a boring little erk whose site I never visited much anyway, so I haven't noticed the deadness.

The lack of reliable bookmarks also means that I now have to own up and link to Neil Gaiman's pointy pointy blog. You can all stop laughing now.

Your soul came from the Bowels of HELL! You're a
demon preying on the mortals of Earth. BACK TO
HELL WITH YOU!


Where Did Your Soul Originate?
brought to you by Quizilla

But then you already knew that.

Paper.

I'm getting increasingly worried about the state of my writing. It's not so much of a problem on this thing, since it's basically just a braindump, and there's no problem with my technical/report writing skills. But the fact remains that over the last few years I've fallen into some bad habits (like starting sentances with "but", for instance). Or maybe I was just never that good?

Reading over those articles, as well as working on the dreaded Book, has really brought home to me how slack I've got. This is supposed to be my craft, you know? A thing which is honed and polised through out the years to become a big... uh... honed, polishy thing. It's not just style I'm concerned with, the ability to find the best turn of phrase, to avoid cliche, etc etc. It's basic stuff like grammar, spelling, proofreading. It's like I got as far as GCSE Eng. and then stalled; or, to be more accurate, degenerated. Can't seem to collect my thoughts anymore.

Don't really know what to do, but if I really intened to drag on with this thing then something's got to change. I've signed up for a writing excercise mailing list (my brain promtly went fzzzt in the face of the first couple of assignments, but hey), and I'm going to try and find some online lessons-- some in creative writing, some in English Language round about the A-Level mark.

Funny to think that the only actual writing-related qualification I possess-- the only one I ever tried for-- is the GCSE in English that I got when I was 15. (I got a B.)

More Work.

Today was less blah, but there's still a blah factor. I'm hoping that a good long work bashing sesh tomorrow will help put things to rights. Apparently it's not just me; a couple of folk on my language course are also bemoaning their joblessness. The bars in town go a bit quiet over summer, apparently; everyone's at the beach. If I don't get something soon I'm gonna end up trudging up and down the sand selling brewskis to the tourists. "CocacolaaAAA! AguaaAAA! FantaaAAA! CervezaaAAA!" Any work's better than no work.

Obviously I would prefer something writing-based, but I reckon that's a nonstarter. Still, maybe something voluntary in that field... we shall see, we shall see.

Trouble is... well, the trouble is that I don't know where to start. Unemployment here is pretty high, and most people seem find jobs through networking. Which is really, really bad news for me because as you may have gathered from the look and feel of this, my corner of the internet, little Mordant doesn't play well with the other kiddies. It's hard to schmooze when you despise everyone, especially people from the land which gave you birth. There's also the whole pervert mutant chaoette anarcho-someting-or-the-other issue; I somehow doubt I'm really going to fit in down the Let's All Sit Around And Complain Bitterly About How It Really Sucks To Voluntarily Leave Your Own Country For No Pressing Reason Other Than The Cheap Booze And Abundant Shiny Sunshine (Which Ironically Is One Of The Things We Bitch About) And Brag About How We've Been Here For 57 Years and We Still Only Know Three Words Of Spanish club.

I've looked into some of the expat women's organizations round here. They have coffee mornings.

And they play... bridge.

There are entities beyond our ken and the entities read my blog (coz I'm hard) and putting things into words = magick.

Okay, Powers that Be, angels, aliens, demons, whoever. I've been patient for long enough. Now I'm going to stamp my tiny foot and demand ACTION.

First off, let's ginger this old nag up a bit, eh? Been blah on an epic scale lately. Sick of BLAH. Not asking to leap out of beddy-byes every morning with a song in my heart, just give me a little get up and go. I feel like my pleasure centres have been replaced with bathroom sealant. I crave oomph.

Second off: Less of the no job nonsense. It's just getting silly. Even the thrift store turned me down. Yes, things have got to the point where people don't even want me to work for fucking free. I'm doing my bit, but-- a little mystic help? A little astral nudge in my favour? A shiny cloak of irresistable hire-me glamour? Anything, really. I will be all grateful and a better person and stuff.

Dream on.

For some reason I have been making cameo appearances in other people's dreams lately, mostly as a power/authority/leader figure of some kind. I'm up to three people so far, which could still be dismissed as coincidence but is verging on the fishy. We shall see.

I can't see you.

But I know yoyu're there. Staring. Always staring. Watching. I hear the sussurus of your flickering eyelashes as you blink, once, maybe twice an hour. Staring! What do you want of me? What do you want of me, you squamous, blasphemous creatures? Get away! Get awayyyyy!

Chafe.

You will have noticed a marked increase in bloggery from this quarter in recent weeks. This is partly to do with the fact that I don't have to fight Lurid Archive for the internet at the moment, but mostly it's because I'm having trouble writing the stuff that I want to be writing. (Yes, this is me with writer's block. Be afraid. Be very afraid.)

Aaaaanyway. I know what all you little fishies really come here for. You want to see the Fattest Woman On Earth, and her Dog-Faced Son. You want to see the Living Skeleton. You want to sit and watch the Amazing Geek eat a live chicken. You don't come for the inbetween days, you come for those too much info posts, doncha? And if you don't, well-- Browser. Back button. Fly, my pretties, fly!

So it happens that today is a hormonal kind of day, and I find that I am in full-on Ginger Snaps mode. An extraordinary, aimless rage consumes me, little tentacles of energy snapping out and snagging on things: my own flaws, all your screw-ups, life stuff, the horror of the world. Memories and newsfeeds. The images flash past my mind too fast to hang onto.

Rghghghghhgh.

I'm sick of sane people. I'm sure I've mentioned this, but it bears repeatin' now: sane people suck. If you don't have at least a few little warps in your record then I have no time for you, for you are a dead thing that walks among the living and your soul is like unto those gritty bits in an economy beefburger. How the hell can you live in this world and not be crazy? Just a tiny weeny bit crazy? What is wrong with you people? Escapism I get-- I totally get-- but don't live your life pretending there's nothing to escape from. You insulate yourselves, numb yourselves to everything that might chafe at your conscience, rationalise every action you take until your passage through life is so slick that you might as well be Vaselined all over. But you miss that friction, don't you? You miss having something to gmaw on. So you pick fights. You scavenge, you scratch around, you nose and snuffle and dig until you find someone with a raw patch on them, someone a touch less mean than you, someone who either can't or won't fight back. You find the chink in the armour and then you de-gut them. Can't find a real person? Fine! There's always a straw-man caricature you can kick around, a made-up bugaboo to get between your teeth and worry at. But don't let anyone criticise you!, oh dear me no. Don't let anyone suggest that there might be the teeniest little flaw in your approach. Don't let anyone suggest that the only pain you are capable of comprehending is your own. If anyone gets on your case, then anything goes. No holds barred. Be imaginative! You can always find a way to be the hero, to rework and rewrite the story until you're a brave little David to a big bad Goliath. Deny, demand, rationalize.

No, actually: I was wrong. We're all mad. It's just that the majority of people are mad in a certain, very specific way, and since everyone around them is mad in the same way, they assume that must be sanity and get very very cross with anyone whose madness doesn't mesh nicely with their own.

Stupid Homo Sapiens Sapiens. I'm defecting. I'm joining the People's Republic of Coffee-tables. With my brains and their built-in magazine racks, we shall rule the WOOOORRRRLLLDDD!

Your time is done, primates.

Gazpacho moments.

Added yet more links to my already elephantine sidebar. This time it's my stuff-- three things I've written and had published online. I've been wrestling with the decision for a while. On one hand, I'm not proud of any of them. The quality of the writing isn't really up to snuff, and the damn things are so riddled with typos and sundry glitches that reading them makes my stomach churn. Be that as it may, it's probably better to have a few peices out there, however flawed, and to make them easily accessable from my main blog. Most of my regulars will already have read the damn things, but if you missed them the first time round then you have only to scroll down to [ Typo Hell ]. Don't say I didn't warn you.

Hey la, hey la...

...My boyfriend's back. Well, almost. Gonna leave in a couple of hours to meet him at the airport. Which is, y'know, good and ungrimful and things.

This next part requires a little background. From a messageboard post I made some months ago:

The threads/paths... Some of them seem to be emotional narratives (which appear to me as thick ropes of plasticine-looking stuff) but a lot of them look like things I call probability strands. It's really hard to describe them since they aren't really three-dimensional shapes. If you can try and picture a long hollow cylindrical shape that's both convex and concave so that you see an inside and an outside at the same time, that's sort of how they look. They also have more colours than the Emotion strands.

(This, incidentally, is how I do a lot of my magick these days. I try and fix it so that events go down the right probability strand. Of course some events don't have a probability strand attached to them so I can't make them happen.)

Did a scry last night to find out about my chances of a job soon. Couldn't hold the trance for long becuase I was too tired but I definately saw quite a few probability strands connecting me to my desired short term future-state. They were nice and short, too, with few tangles. (The length of the strands tends to refer to time, the convolutions to difficulties encountered in achieving one's goal. Colours generally refer to the field of influence-- job-related probability strands generally show up yellow.) Some of the strands looked a bit stunted, though, and the future-state node was small and gnarly-looking, which means that my next job will probably suck. But hey, we didn't need to scry to find that one out, did we?

Beyond the immediate mesh of strands, I can see a large oblong mass, a bit like the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssy. I think this might be the main career-node, but there's not enough detail avaliable yet. I can do these scrys without entering a trance, but there's less detail and it's harder to interact with the strands. The job strands are particularly unweildy, perhaps because my desire for a nice job has little to do with right action/Will/whatever you call it. Magick to get what you want is always a lot harder than magick to get what you really need. (Stupid magick.)

Although I'm remaining fairly well grounded I am spending less and less time in what I might call normal human consciousness. When I do pop back, it's uncomfortable; restrictive. (How ya gonna keep them down on the farm, now that they've seen Paree..?) The trouble is that when I do go back, I forget there's any other way to look at the world. I get trapped in my old, linear/paranoiac/negativistic mindset, and all I can see is rejection, prejudice, obstacles. Every time you see me getting all mizogged about everyday things, that's me temporarily forgetting to be a magickian.

I almost never perform rituals now, preferring to potter around in my little string garden. I mean to get back into that again. Should I ever misplace my ability to see and interact with the probability web, it would be a real downer to have no fallback position. You can never rehearse the basics too much. You can never build too sturdy a foundation.

Nope, it's gone.

Lucky I write all my posts in Notepad, eh? Let's try that again...

Stupid Blogger.

Hmm. That last post seems to have gone byebye. Maybe a quick bump?

I am losing what little patience I had.

Right. I'm officially fed up and desirous of my life back.

I was absoultely determined that this week I'd get a firm job lead of some kind or another, but the cupboard has remained bare. I've already tried a lot of places and been turned away, so I'm having to look further and further afield. Extensive perusal of the job boards confirms that the Spanish electronics industry is just as dead here as everywhere else. Still and all, I'll see if I can't find a few companies in want of assembly staff.

On the voluntary front, I'm going to see if Humana need any staff in their thrift stores tomorrow. Unlikely that they'll have paying work, but that's not the point. The point is that a person needs a bit more shape to their day than two hours of language school in the arvo.

Am I really that unemployable? Seriously. Am I going to spend the rest of my life scratching around for crappy little jobs everywhere I go? I know my CV is a bit patchy, what with the discrepancy between my electronics quals and the kind of jobs I've been doing, but I'm getting turned down by burger bars, FFS. How can anyone be too shit to work in a burger bar?

I'm really starting to worry that I've blown it, that because my emlpoyment history is all this minimum-wage stuff nobody's ever going to consider me for anything else. You're only as good as your last job these days, and fresh starts get thinner on the ground the older you get.

This is ridiculous. I mean, me! Mordant Carnival! Turned down by purveyors of rancid lard and BSE! They should be kissing the hem of my combats and begging me to flip their bits of dead cow! Filthsome snitticles.

So I've been googling for, uhhh, adult emporia and events and so forth, where I might actually be appreciated. Should've tried the scene in the first place, but I came over all shy for some reason. Jeese, it's hard to find listings for s£x shops on the internet, particularly when you don't know how to say "s£x shop" en español. You think you have to wade through pr0n to get to an ordinary site? I can't even turn on the content filter; that would sort of defeat the object.

Being boring.

One of those days. Meant to set off for town early and sniff out some job leads, but what with one thing and another I didn't get moving. Then I had a phone call from the language school telling me lesson was cancelled on account of staff sickness. That depressed the heck out of me for some reason.

Been too much of a shut-in lately. When I'm not at my class or surfing from bagsnatcher central, all I do is sit at home and study Spanish-- plus the odd break to play Icewind Dale. It's starting to mess with my mind. The other night I dreampt about a two-headed giant that wouldn't let me go past him until I'd conjugated several irregular verbs.

I reaaaally need to get out more.

Maybe getting out and about would be easier if I lived in town, but that's by-the-by. What I need is work, any work.

Trouble is... I'm all wrong for this, d'you see? I disconcert people. Too old to be a traveller scrounging for bar work. Not old or rich enough to be an expat looking for a place in the sun. I had this problem back in the UK, of course, being neither one thing nor the other, but here it's slightly worse because of the language barrier.

I'm going to redouble my efforts to find a job, be more assertive and imaginative. Besides all that, though, there's always voluntary work. Something I can fit around a paying job; half a day here, a couple of hours there. I'm not really sure where to start, but hey-- this is a university campus, there'll be something I can do. Maybe the SU needs something typing, or one of the thrift stores in town needs una dependienta? To recive, you must have your hands open, blah de blah de blah. Whatever.

Bored now. Job please.

Incomiiiinggggg!

Got sick of the psi site I was working from. Just too daft, you see. I realised that I've just had enough of a certain kind of daft. 'Scuse me, I feel a Bruce Banner moment coming on...

I'm getting more and sick of the denial-of-science crud that seems to infest everything these days. Don't like the scientific method? Don't think science has anything useful to say about the way the world works? Fine. Only do me a favour, yeah? Get the hell off the internet. That computer you're tap-tapping away at as you write yet another of your smug, pompous, reflexive diatribes is a product of the system you're so keen to denounce. In fact, get the hell out of modern civilization. Go and live in some desert place or a jungle or something, try and scratch a living in a hunter-gatherer stylee. Possibly you'll get some hideous disease, or something big and ugly will pass by and eat your legs; however, this shouldn't phase you at all because (as you keep telling me) we all create our own reality, maaaaan. I'm sure a clever little person like you will just whip out your copy of Solipsistic Wankage For Dummies and rustle up a new one.

See, if these jerks had an actual real Zen Master instead of a headful of skindeep Little Book of Po-mo slush, the Zen Master would have bonked them on their big stupid heads multiple times until they stopped coming out with this "reality isn't real" guff every time they opened thier mouths. There should be an emergency line where you could phone for an irate Zen Master to come round and bonk heads with a stick. Dammit, there should be some kind of Zen Fairy, some little sprite that appears whenever a nincompoop comes out with that "well, reality is, like, a mental construct, yeah? So we all create our own reality, you see? There is no spoon-- no, no, listen-- there is no spoon!" bilge, and whacks them repeatedly over the head with a really really big whacking stick. "Deconstruct this! BONK ON HEAD!"

See, as long as stick go BONK against skull, one needs science. As long as we are confined within the cloven pine of cause and effect, we shall need to understand the nature of the physical universe. Just trotting out stuff about how we shape the world with our minds and blah-de-blah-de-blah doesn't make the world disappear in a puff of special effects.

Don't tell me we can escape our linear, 2-and-a-half-D world when you don't even know what that means. You haven't escaped. You haven't even sorted out conjugal visits and a place on the prison's adult literacy programme. You haven't done squat except read the Illuminatus books, take very weak acid and then talk everyone's ear off. You are boring and repetative and need BONK on HEAD.

Also: Magick not parapsychology, fool. There's a certain amount of overlap, but it's not the same bunny. Not at all.

Also also: You do realise that the oh-so-liberating "all history is fiction!" thing you keep trotting out could be employed to bolster some verrry dubious political stances? Not going all Godwin's Law here, just sayin'.

Aaaanyway. What were we talking about again? Psi. Right. Having given up on Wingmakers, it's back to The Playful Psychic, where they at least pay lip service to the concept of reproducable results. Just going over the basics for now, psi-balls and the like. My psi-balls feel pretty good, firm and springy. I love playing with my psi-balls, squeezing and rubbing and... okay, okay, I'll stop. Seriously, there does seem to be a bit of an improvement, but it's hard to say. Could just be playing head-games with myself. We shall see. In any case I belive I shall stick to this excercize programme for now.

And in other news:

Book: Fine-tuning alphabet. Must have started it over at least a dozen times now. Working on humans-only scenes while the alphabet takes shape. Two characters keep wanting to cop off with each other. I don't want them to cop off. Mucks up plot. Will chuck a bucket of water over them in a minute. Also, I've developed a frankly bizzare crush on one of the bad guys. Stupid characters.

Spanish: Having trouble committing irregular verbs to memory. Stupid irregular verbs.

Job: No job. Fed up. Too old to waitress, apparently. Will poke agencies harder, but I fear the real answer is to call upon the Powers to aid me. Which I hate doing because every time I do it they send me something utterly FOUL, like litter-picking or whatever. Joke's over, guys. Whatever I was supposed to be learning from this-- graduated! Want nice happy job now. Go on. If you're going to play fast and loose with my metabolism and sleeping patterns, you can at least help me with the job thing.

I know you're reading this. I can hear you breathing.

Stupid Powers.

And the fun just keeps on leaving.

Turns out that the webzine in question is down. When I checked yesterday there was just a placeholder where the site should have been. Now the site's message board is back up, but nothing else is working.

Thing is, the exact same thing happened last summer. I sent off a story and the webzine disappeared due to hosing problems. I am a webzine jinx.

Bleph.

Decided to dust off the prehistoric animal story. I submitted it to another, unrelated webzine before leaving London, but since they haven't done me the courtesy of saying yea or nay in the nine or ten months that they've had it, fudge'em.

Lost.

You know I sent off that story the other day? Still haven't heard back, or even had an acknowledgement from the webzine. Don't know if a) the submission form thing I used isn't working, b) I somehow managed to mistype my email address, or c) the story was so poor and so far from what they want that they're just ignoring me and hoping I'll go away. Not the first time that's happened. I do make a point of reading a few issues of a zine before I submit anything, and these guys have bought from me before, but it's still entirely possible that I misjudged the market with this one.

Don't know whether to email them and find out what's happened, or just leave it alone and see if they get in touch. Feh.

Blair on those dodgy dossiers: "Mistakes were made".

%Gosh, really, Tone? You don't say.%

In which the diarist rails against the Powers.

Right after I got my Sekhim and Reiki attunements, I noticed an appreciable decrease in my tolerance for such things as alcohol and caffine. (Not that I was ever particularly good at holding my drink, but still...) So I cut down, adjusted, reflected on how it was probably for the best etc. Then came the sugar crashes; no longer could I relive my PMS with a surfeit of fudge. Well, not unless I wanted to spend the rest of the day struggling to keep my eyes open, anyhow.

And now it's not just sugar, but large portions of anything starchy which have this knockout effect. It's okay if I have lots of veggies and fiberous stuff with it, but a few slices of white bread or similar seem to put me out like a light. And I can't offset the effects with a swift jolt of coffee or gallons of cola, because the gnawing pain behind my eyes kicks in a lot faster these days.

I am not impressed. Spirits, angels, higher self, whoever's responsible for this: You spooky perverts have a lot to answer for. First my already laughable drinking legs are swiped from under me, then you force me to ration my espresso, then you fix it so I can't eat obscene quantities of sweeties anymore, and now I can't even fill up on bread when I'm peckish. I feel emasculated! Okay, so I didn't eat that stuff all the time anyway, but at least I knew I had the choice. Cheap lager, junk food, crisps, chocolate-- these things were part of my IDENTITY, dammit! You won't be happy until I'm living on brown rice and beansprouts! I demand to be able to shovel vast amounts of utter trash into my body, as and when I feel the need!

Well, you haven't won yet. I defy you. I'm having this beer. And that processed cheese sarny. And some crisps and a mars bar. You can't stop me, y--

*thunk*

ZzzzzzzZZzzzzzz....

Kicking.

Began my new Spanish course yesterday (Monday). They're starting from a very basic level, which means it's a bit boring at the moment. However, it's a fairly intensive programme and I'm sure I'll be glad of the revision when we get onto the harder stuff.

After class I sauntered off to the beach to do my homework, then went to see The Matrix: Reloaded. I was pleasantly surprised by how much fun it was. Yay! Kicking! P.V.C.! Motorbikes! More kicking! XPLOSHUNS! Hot'n'cold running Hugo Weaving! Endearing attempts at plot-twistyness which wouldn't have surprised a crosseyed two-year-old! Keanu's muscles! And other bits! Which in no way diminished my L.F. crush! Much more kicking! Yayyyy!

The Matrix = kicking movie. Damn, it is such a relief that most people have finally got over all the quasi-Bhuddist mystical crap in the first film and stopped touting it as a radical brainscrunge. Reality might not be real, and could concievably be constructed by a big 'puter? Gosh-a-roonie. Being lied to by our authority figures, you say? Well, I never did. Use your consciousness to affect the world around you? Have a marzipan petit four. Have two. And the spoon thing-- Gordon Bennett. I thought people would never shut up about that bloody spoon! The number of times I heard that stupid phrase trotted out, often by people who were simultaneously demanding that I unquestioningly accept the existance of a whole canteen of monogrammed stainless-steel cutlery, including grapefruit-knife and melon-scoop. No, you jackass, I'm not hidebound by my rigid scientific background, it's just that you're full of horseapples. You're so spiritually bankrupt that you're looking to Hollywood blockbusters for enlightenment. Now shut up and go away-- I'm trying to watch the kicking movie.

Finished the re-write on my latest short story. I have a terrible suspicion it might be utterly lame, but I'm going to punt it out anyway just as soon as I sort out my PayPal ishoos. I may just set up a new account, since the old one hasn't got any money in it and I messed up the credit-card thingy anyway.

Soul.

Go away. I'm having an identity crisis.

I wish magick worked like on the telly, where you go off to a cave or a desert or a haunted house and spend a night or two undergoing hellacious trials, after which you emerge irrevocably altered but chock full of powers. Instead it's like building an actual size model of St. Paul's Cathederal out of legos. Stupid magick. I want my powers.