Looney Toon

I thought about calling Looney Toon today. In fact I didn't just think about it, I got my phone out. I was leaving Ruby Blue (weekly work conference thing) and was walking to Piccadilly station to go back to the bar, and I laughed out loud at a joke I once made up. And right then, I wanted to call her and tell her.

And for a second, I genuinely considered it. It didn't seem like a bad idea.

Maybe I should give this one some thought.

..or maybe I should forget this one entirely.

I don't know any more.

I'm Man United And He's A Spoon.

So I saw Rocket Boy the other day. Even amongst my 'cutting out all things crap' phase he managed to slip through somehow. It's not really worth a proper blog post, but I thought I'd copy down an email I just sent to Pickled Lily, as I'm sure some time in the future this will be a hilarious parlour story to tell on bad dates/girls nights, or a case study for The Guide, and as such should be at least mildly documented.

--------------------------------

Sent: 23/10/2009 00:47

Subject: Rubbish.

Ok so I just started writing you a text, then halfway through discovered it was nearly 4 text-pages long so tried to downsize and take out words etc, but I just couldn't cut my ranting - so decided to email instead.. I'm sure you're thrilled lol. But here it is anyway..

So I'm pretty sure Rocket Boy has a girlfriend.

*pause for 'sudden but inevitable saw-that-one-coming' sound effect*

I am so stupid! Seriously man, like whole new levels of insane semi-masochistic are-you-retarded levels of stupid that I seem to keep surpassing by the bloody day! And yeah I probably shouldn't be as annoyed/affected as I am, but I don't care, it's just so ridiculous! I mean the thing that gets me is this - I am so much better than him. Like sooooo much better than him. In SO many ways I am out of his league - I'm like Premier League dammit!! In fact I'm so out of his league, his league is just redundant. His league may as well be.. a spoon. Yep, I'm Man United and he's a spoon. That's how out of his league I am!

Anyway, my ranting is turning a little surreal so that's a sign I shouldn't do a 12-hr shift then flick through random Facebooks until I inevitably stumble upon things I don't want to know.

Stupid wanker.

"Will you text me some time and we'll go for a drink, I promise I'll be less shit this time.." - what, so this is you being less shit is it, Rocket Boy? Hmm?? Less shit involves being a total weirdo with me, does it? Being as up and down as a psychotic yo-yo on speed, hmmm?? Being rude, then awkward, then flirting with me and humming Paramore songs under your breath in what I can only imagine is your strange way of yet again cryptically referencing/telling me things that I don't bloody understand, making me feel like I'm the crazy one, hmmmm?? You 'being less shit' is finally asking me for a drink - or actually, making it so that I'm the one who has to ask you for a drink, then leaving me hanging, only to discover during this entire time you've casually developed a girlfriend?? Less shit, are you, Rocket Boy? Hmmmmmm?? Really?? HMMMMMMMMM?????

Right so before you start calling the men in white coats to get me sanctioned, take a second to laugh defeatedly here with me, mate.

Seriously, I'm not kidding.

...


You good? Nodding and shaking your head with a slight for-fucks-sake expression? Good. I feel less alone now.

Man, I slightly can't believe we're not at the Lion right now, with a bottle of wine and a pack of cigarettes - rather, I'm in my bed, wired, at 1 in the morning knowing I have to be up in 5 hours, and the next chance I'll have to sit in the Lion with you and a bottle of wine, is at least 2 days away.

I'll call you tomorrow at a more normal time, with a more normal frame of mind.

Sorry for the rant - what would I do without you to rant at? Even when you're not here..!

xxxx

ps. Thanks for not being rubbish. Other people are rubbish. Everyone else is rubbish - well, mainly Rocket Boy, but everyone else too.

..For fucks sake, if anything he's more shit this time!

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Behold.. My Mr Willoughby

All these midnight meetings,
Have built you up to be
The man who tells me what I want to hear
But never will proceed.
Behold.. my Mr. Willoughby.

Now I remember the time
When I first met you in the warehouse.
In my mind we were dancing until daylight
And singing in the streets,
Arm in arm and cheek to cheek.

But now it's been a while since we first met,
And every time we meet,
You always promise me promises you dont keep.

Like your promise of a bike ride,
Or that vegetarian food.
You said you would be with me by late July,
You just had to get your hands untied..
But it's Autumn now and the leaves are brown
And you, and you still keep letting me down.

Now I remember the time
When we were standing by the water,
You pushed me up against the wall
And kissed me in a way
No man has ever kissed a woman before.

You can't do these things to me,
You can't make me feel like I'm in a film
When there's another that you bluff,
And your promises are dust,
But will I ever get enough of Willoughby?

For now there is a man pursuing me..
And he is open, he is honest, he is probably what I need
But still I cling to your shackles, I don't wanna be freed.
Because I'm a secret optimist -
It's probably the most annoying thing I could be.

..But where's my bloody bike ride?
Where's my vegetarian food?
You said you would be with me by late July
You just had to get your hands untied
But its Autumn now and the leaves are brown
And you, and you still keep letting me down.

And why are you so like my father?
I should've noticed from the start
That youre a Scorpio man.
And Scorpio men,
They only ever meddle with my heart.

No More.

So I predicted this in a lazy rambling manner in a post a few months back, in August in fact..

".. quite probably the next time my feet touch the ground and everything settles down, it will be into a life that is completely different"

Man, I must know the crazy patterns of my life better than I ever thought. I write this now from my room in a new flat in West Hampstead, on my day off from a new full-time job, with an entirely different head space going on. I'm currently settling in to a new routine, a new flat, a new job and a new life ideally, in which I've decided to clear out all the muck from my regular routine/life/head, and just take care of myself and my life.

The first 2 weeks of October were a bit mental, with going out all the time and packing and moving out, and moving in, and unpacking, and I somehow managed to find a job in the space of 2 days. So starting said job, still only half packed and half moved in, with little/no money and no real idea of how I'd ended up moving house and starting a new job on the same day - this all made October a little hectic to say the least. I then had a bit of a breakdown at work last week and had to be hospitalised with exhaustion, and was poked and prodded even more and generally had the worst day ever - at St. bloody Mary's of course, and had to get Pickled Lily to pick me up and cab me home (against doctor's orders of 2 weeks bed rest).

The main shock to the system about that one was that when doctors were trying to assess how I'd gotten to the level of clinical exhaustion, we went through my daily routine, which while busy and technically stress-packed, wasn't stressing me out enough to keep me up at night, or to drain me that much - and gradually the penny dropped (its taken 22-odd years) that it's all the other bullshit in my life that fucks me up. Everything I've ever done to get by - all the different work, education, moving flats/houses, all of that I deal with as and when, and I'm bloody good at adapting so it doesn't stress my brain and body out. I can look back at any given time in my life and see all the mental work/school/housing related situations and the unbelievable stress levels that went along with them, and conclude that it's that part of my life that makes me so stressed. But I've been fucking wrong. I'm going to write that sentence again because it's rare you'll hear me say it.

I've been fucking wrong.

It's never been moving in and out of places, or having no money, or dropping in and out of education that's worn me out. It's the other bullshit. My mother being one, my friends being another, various lovers and passing men, my own stupid head, meeting the expectations of eeeveryone from my family to strangers to my own insane expectations of myself.. but mainly, it's been everyone else.

I sat in the hospital, feeling uneblievably vulnerable and unbelievably stupid and even more annoyed at myself for taking so long to realise - why do I have these things/people in my life? Why do I always have to do everything for everyone else? Sort everyone elses shit out, everyone elses life problems, money situations, nights out, why do I feel the need to fill the gaps in everyone elses lives and heads, which leave me too drained to deal with my own? I'm such an idiot.

Anyway much more internal ranting and disbelief at my own idiocy and weakness later, I found myself in my new little room with an ill-advised but much-needed glass of wine, after just another appalling day in the hospital, thinking no more. No fucking more.

So I'm going to try and cut everything out of my life that I don't want in it. I'm slightly scared of making too much of a statement about this because of the amount of times throughout my life I've said no more and then fallen straight back into the old routines of trying desperately to please everyone around me - but this is my point, I kind of know I'm a bit too weak willed and a bit too old-habits-die-hard to stop trying to please everyone around me, so I'm left with the option of just making sure the only people around me are those who won't demand anything from me that I don't want to give freely.

Basically, I'm downsizing. Starting afresh as best I can, by stopping trying to change my head, instead trying to change my life and hope my head just adapts. Which it always does. Things in my life go mental so much through the years, so regularly and so abruptly and my head has always just gone with it, dealt with every time my life changes. So it's nothing new really. Except that this time I'm going to be the one that changes it.

Because otherwise I'm going to wake up in 10 years and find myself in the exact same bloody situation, and will probably be surprised. And I don't know why I'm always surprised when this happens.. I've heard it said that the very definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results - so I must be fucking mental.

Ok, enough analysis and enough italics and enough grand statements. I'm just going to note down, very quietly to myself, that taking care of yourself isn't selfish. And so what if it is - everyone's gotta be a little selfish. I don't need to look out for everyone. Just me and mine.

Currently that involves just keeping my head down, not going out because I feel like I should or I owe my friends anything, and just working - my new job has been mildly enlightening in this respect actually. It's been entirely new to me to be in an environment where no-one judges me on anything but my own mind/actions, and respect is given freely when due, and where I'm just another person. No-one's saving grace, or punching bag. It's been a lovely reminder of how I should be treated. Why does it take a perfectly normal working environment to make me realise I don't deserve to be treated like shit? And honestly, when I leave work, even after a 12-hour shift of running to and from offices and bars and making a hundred phonecalls and sending a hundred emails and decorating and carrying shit around and having no lunch break to speak of - I never leave feeling emotionally drained. Physically drained, maybe - but that's not what gets me in a state where I'm in the hospital with exhaustion. One 5-minute conversation with my mother does that bit.

Fuck it, at the risk of making too grand a statement, putting too much pressure on myself, and yet again setting up too high an expectation, I'm just gonna say it and hope for the best - no more.

No more.

Me vs. My Life

So I have absolutely no inclination towards partying or drinking or having any fun at the moment. After all my buildup of turning-23 anxiety, and restlessness, I now only want to stay in bed watching tv.

I'm slightly worried that this is the natural pattern of me vs. my life - for as long as I can remember it goes like this. I have to deal with life and all the crap therein, so I do, I spend months/years sorting out whatever job/family/money-related disasters that are inevitably going on, which takes its toll and makes me hate being so in control and dealing with everything, so I long to let loose and fly free and other such cliches, and I finally do for a while (canada being the longest period of this kind to date - 2 months) but then life smacks me in the face with whatever work/family/money/heart related disaster I now need to sort out, and I'm back to dealing-with-it mode.

It's fine though, soon I'll be tired of dealing with it, and long to let loose and fly free and other such cliches.. and so on and so forth. Until I split into 2 different people entirely - one who runs around sorting everything out, being sensible and careful and mechanical, with the world on her shoulders, and another who gets drunk and parties and laughs all the time, and doesn't give a shit about anything but drinking and partying and laughing.

I don't want to be either of those girls.

A Cobain/Grohl/Novoselic Induced Musical Orgasm

I've spent the last hour just lying on my back, on my bed, with my legs crossed, staring at the ceiling, and listening to Nirvana's In Utero.

Every few years or so, I get a bit restless with my music, and I can't ever seem to find the right song/album/playlist. And for a while I scour my old reliables (Sia, Aqualung, Muse, Athlete, Stevie Wonder) and while they satisfy my thirst for good music, I still don't feel like it does the trick. So I turn to music I've been into recently to see if that fits (Noisettes, Glasvegas, Nitin Sawhney, Paramore, Hip Parade) but I've already been through the discovery christ-how-good-is-this-album period, so I start to grow tired of them, at which point I take them off my ipod/playlists immediately for fear of ruining them (which I've already done with the Noisettes latest album. It was too good, and I overdid it. And now, heartbreakingly, I've forgotten how good it is because I'm too familiar with it and it's started to annoy me.)

Anyway, then I listen to any old thing on shuffle because when I try to think what music I want, it just escapes me. I go through genres and subgenres (soft rock, hard rock, glam rock, pop rock, indie, americana, blues, soundtracks, classical, motown, soul, 50s girl groups, jazz, hiphop, triphop, funk, rnb, rap, barbershop, disco, electro, garage, break beat..) and nothing seems to fit.

So I conclude that what's happened is I'm just not aware of all the cool music out there because I've been so lax about discovering new music, so have become bored of my own music collection. So I scour for new music, which does the trick for a while (Belleruche, Lux Lisbon, Airplane, some Nico stuff I never knew existed, TM Juke and the Jack Baker Trio..) but while that excites and interests me, it still doesn't satisfy - in the course of a day, when I get my ipod out, put my headphones in, light up a ciggie and prepare to walk to wherever I'm going, I need (always have, and always will) the perfect soundtrack to my life. In fact, I do at any given time, but at these times the most. I am at my happiest when walking along the street anonymously, watching the scenery pass by, smoking a cigarette and being simultaneously connected to everything around me and everything inside me via the sounds coming through my headphones and into my brainium.

And that only happens when I've got music that gets me, at whatever stage of my life/day/span of emotions I'm in at that very moment. So not having this little but vital comfort puts me on edge, and feeling weird, to say the least. And I start to treat my ipod as background noise, and find myself not adjusting the noise level/bass/headphone positioning every other minute as usual, rather shoving the headphones in and zoning out.

And then one random day, out of nowhere, from absolutely the very back corner of my cluttered mind, a thought appears - Nirvana.

And I brush it aside, as you would a band that you connect so intrinsically with the very fibre of your adolescence and all that that entailed (angst, insecurity, anger, confusion, hormones, school, utter stupidity..) and of course a band that are so hyped and overhyped and overcovered through the musical ages that you almost forget that there was a reason you once shamelessly wore a Nevermind tshirt to death, like every other angst-ridden wanting-to-be-unique greasy-haired Camden teenager, and that even though your musical preferences weren't as well-honed and well-travelled as they are now, sometimes the crowd is right. Sometimes, ever so rarely, but sometimes, things are as good as the hype, and shouldn't be too harshly judged on the repercussions they've reaped upon the mainstream (Nirvana are, in my mind, entirely responsible for at least 4 years of appalling NME-encouraged meaningless scenester grunge music that would have made the Jesus and Mary Chain vomit in shame for punk rock)

See, I loved Nirvana at that same point in my life where everyone loves Nirvana - unhappy cliche'd adolescence. They were the beginning of my journey into endless branches of music discovery, and to this day I lazily bracket them as too obvious and thus irrelevant. Because what self-respecting music fan would ever put Nevermind in a Top 5 Albums list? None. That's for people who think that Creed were heavy metal, and that the Arctic Monkeys are punk. A real indie music lover's top 5 list would consist of four obscure offbeat albums, with one cult classic for good measure. Much as we'll never admit it, us music lovers are damn elitists and point-scorers. Hence, as a people, us not being able to handle a band becoming successful - the 'selling out' issue being that we just can't bear to see people who haven't researched and studied and carefully considered and referenced every album they buy, liking the bands that we've claimed as our own. We've felt so very snooty all this time with our little musical secrets, and the plebs of the general populus shouldn't just be able to get how good a band are because it lowers their value if they do. We've worked hard to be able to appreciate real music and we have very little else in our lives, dammit!

Anyway, what am I talking about? I'm ranting now somehow - what was my point?

Ah yes, my point was this. Rediscovering Nirvana. A mix of nostalgia, comforting familiarity, and pure musical awe (and shame for doubting, and then forgetting, just how good they actually were) - I know this because about an hour and a half ago, I randomly and tentatively put In Utero on, and immediately felt at home. I had forgotten..

Broken hymen of your highness, I'm left black
Hey - wait - I got a new complaint
Forever in debt to your priceless advice
She eyes me like a Pisces when i am weak
I've been locked inside your heart shaped box for weeks
Hey - wait - I got a new complaint
Forever in debt to your priceless advice
Your advice..
Your adviiieeece..

Ahhhh man, Heart Shaped Box. Used to be my favourite song (obviously. Yes I was a cliche, £5 Levi's and Ramones tshirt and all..) when I was about 15, and I had genuinely forgotten how good it is. There's something so fundamentally honest about listening to Nirvana, at any age, on your own, in your bed, smoking a cigarette and smiling to yourself at the rusty familiarity of every chord progression, every bit of distortion or little yelp from Kurt..

I miss the comfort in being saaaad..

Anyway, I'm getting quite carried away and have already lost most of my evening to rediscovering the Nirv' so I'm going to go and start on Bleach, maybe sing along to About A Girl (I need an easy friend, I do, with an ear to lend, I do think you fit this shoe, I do, won't you have a clue.. take advantage while you hang me out to dry.. Free, I do.. ), and finish off with some MTV Unplugged. I just know, when the first few bars of The Man Who Sold The World kicks in, I'm going to have some sort of aural Bowie/Cobain-induced orgasm.

Ahhhhh their cover of Son Of A Gun off of Incesticide, I'd forgotten how good this makes me feel, it's literally the musical equivalent to a threesome. I'm being double-teamed at full blast by Kurt Cobain and the Vaselines, and I am loving it!