Thursday 8 November 2012

"I wondered how long it would take before you'd show your face round here again."

"Hello Avi."

 "Not that it's ever the same face of course. Old habits die hard, huh."

 "How long did it take you to recognise me?"

 "Oh, don't flatter yourself. That mole underneath your chin; the immaculateness of your hair - you always kept it that way whoever you were; the studied vacancy of your expression...yeah. You can never hide from me. What are you doing here?"

 "I'm catching a bus, Avi, same as you. What else would I be doing?"

 "Seriously? You're seriously going to try this with me? Don't you think you've lied enough?"

 "Not everything has to be a play. I've moved on. We've moved on. I'm just riding the bus. Really."

 "Sure. Ya know I think I'll walk from here, I've not got far to go. Real nice bumping into you Dan, a real treat, but time's a wasting, see ya round."

 "He's sick, Avi."

 "...What?"

 "He's sick. Please don't pretend not to know what I'm talking about."

 "Well it's true, I don't. I don't! Fuck you. What are you talking about? What's wrong with him...how long does he have?"

 "Two months, if things remain as they are."

 "...Why are you telling me this?"

 "Avi, the three of us will never really be separate. Despite what you may think, Aryeh and I-"

 "Daniel, SHUT UP."

 "Okay. But listen Avi. I remember how we were all those years ago just like it was yesterday. I know that everything we did is burned into your mind just as it is with mine. You love him, still. Please don't look at me like that Avi - I know you, okay? In any case, Aryeh is not somebody that people like you or I could ever cast out of our minds."

 "And what the fuck made you think I would help out, exactly? We haven't exchanged a word in 5 years. My life is different - better. Less childish and self-absorbed. You and Aryeh left me in a gutter, and I climbed out. I'm never coming back to you - even if he is sick."

 "I'm not going to try to convince you. You'll help."

 "Christ, Dan, that arrogance never left you did it? ...What the hell do you think we could do anyway, supposing I didn't despise the pair of you? Let me guess. There's a doctor who can help, but he charges the sun and the moon. We do one last play, raise the cash to save him. You make me feel included as long as I'm needed for the play, and then you slam the door as soon as you sign off for the bill. Well it's a stupid plan, even from your warped perspective. His condition is not treatable. You'd be postponing the inevitable, and not by much. We always knew this would happen. I'm not risking everything for that. No way."

 "There is no Doctor, Avi."

 "Then why are you here?"

"After you left, we packed it all in, almost. We hustled to get by, but no big runs anymore. This was at my insistence. The way things finished with the three of us... it proved to me that we were not gods, that we could fail.  I wanted Aryeh to myself for as long as God would grant, which meant no more plays. After a while I went into teaching - an old back up, a dullard's everyman dream which would pay the bills. Aryeh, though... you know how he is. I don't think he ever let go of the thrill of it all, that daring spirit in him was irrepressible. I should've seen it coming. It is, after all, why you and I love him. For my sake he held it down. The past 5 years have been incredible, in their way, but in truth something has been missing. Perhaps something is always missing, perhaps no two people can solve the riddle entirely - but that is how it has been. Now that death is coming for him, I have no further basis or desire to hold him back. We - the three of us - will perform our final play, a perfect play, before he dies. We owe it to our lives and to each other. That's all I ask from you."

 "Hah! Listen to yourself. We're conmen, Daniel. Not artists."

 "Any task carried out with sufficient skill becomes art. This is my bus. When you are ready, call me."

Thursday 12 July 2012

Goldsmiths have failed my degree on a technicality even though I got good marks and a first in my dissertation. People are being helpful and supportive about it on facebook. I am reading the long earth. it's really good. Soon I will get back on the guitar properly. I will I will I will. I have been playing that one beatles tune, that one cat stevens tune, and the opening sequence of knives out for fucking ages. I feel really warm towards people and the world as I write this. It's not the kind of warm that whitewashes problems or failings. I know about those. I just feel warm anyway, I like people.

Thursday 21 June 2012

:)

"Andrej’s mind, like any sane human’s … was a constantly convulsing dialectical unity of consciousness and subconsciousness, the battening down and channelling of dreams and desires, the recurring re-creation of the subliminal by the contradictory, the rational-capricious ego. And vice versa. The interaction of levels of consciousness into an unstable and permanently self-renewing whole."

Monday 11 June 2012

The last few weekends

Have all been good. :) Lots of drinking and socialising. Happy alex.

Sunday 20 May 2012

Exams done!

Thank fuck for that. Not hugely confident about how successful they will have been, but fuck it - they're done. Uni is done... A dizzying thought, that one. The average wage for a uni graduate is a tenner an hour. That would be sooo good. 400 a week. mmmhmm. :) No idea where I will be able to work, though. None at all. Maybe as an archivist. Jess is in Wales on the beach where they filmed a bit of Harry Potter. She's looking at bugs and shit and analysing... I think species diversity? She has a real degree. After medicine, dentistry and engineering, science degrees are the best for career prospects. She is doing a real degree. But I do really love history. it's difficult to really explain why. I mean you can offer the cliches, like studying the past as a guide to how to proceed in the present, and thats true, but it wouldn't necessarily make it fun. But I still find it fun. I should really try and write something soon. Guitar is coming along quite well, and so is cooking. I am a skill monkey. haha. gonna party my arse off this summer I think. I fancy another round of hedonism.

Saturday 5 May 2012

gonna do a massive workout.

I'm gonna try to do the hardest workout I've ever done to make the day a bit more notable. I'll report back in an hour on how it went, I guess mostly it'll be me trying to come up with creative phrases to express how exhausted I am but being unable by virtue of my exhaustion. here goes!

Monday 30 April 2012

The first day of work went quite well.

If I don't cock it up I should be able to work until the end of august and have a bit of money.
I really miss jess.

Life at the end of April.

Finished my dissertation and other bits of work, to a dubious standard no doubt on account of my exhaustion and general dementia by the time of the actual deadline. Then I slept 18 hours, came to hastings, went and got smashed with jacob, shannon, olive, codie and katie (everyone else joined in later) and that was awesome. Then got smashed the next day at the webb house with everyone, plus george, codie and two crazy irish dudes who claimed to drink tequila by the gallon, and that neat tequila was 'pisswater'. That was awesome. Then I went to mums and had bare fruit and veg and a big cooking sessions with her which was good + restorative. Now I'm about to go start work at the warehouse, and I'm having a green tea to wake me up 'cause I only got about 6 hours sleep. This is my life at the end of April.


Thursday 26 April 2012

This really is reaching the level of a physical endurance test. I'm splashing my face with water every 10 minutes and snapping my fingers in front of my face to make sure I keep thinking instead of drifting. I'm becoming quite interested in what I'm writing about, (Rousseau, Wollstonecraft, Masculine-Feminine dichotomy) which is jsut one of those bizarre little things that quite often happens when the situation is already absurd.

Tuesday 24 April 2012

!!!

Less than 48 hours and all my deadlines will be gone. The next day and a half is going to be insane. Caffeine ahoy. I'm already on a kind of buzz mode so that the ten minutes until my train back to the flat seems a massive waste of time and I'm writing a blog to give my fingers something to do. Maybe I should get some speed.

Monday 16 April 2012

Tumblr

I have resorted to actually searching for 'dissertation' as a tag on Tumblr. My procrastination seems to have a mind of its own, and a penchant for ridiculousness. I have learned that you print off the dissertation for 'binding', and it ends up as a little book? wtf? that's weird. I'll have a little book that I've written, sort of.

Weirdly though, looking at the tumblr posts has motivated me. Gonna do 1000 words, right after this blog. yes sireee. mm. yep. Freikorps here I come you fucking scum-fuck-piece of shit-cunts

Sunday 15 April 2012

I can hear a party a couple of streets away

It sounds cool. After this is done I'm gonna rinse so many drugs that I forget everything I know about the German Revolution. And history generally. And about ordinary tasks.

Friday 13 April 2012

Enchiladas

They looked shit in the photograph so I'm not putting them up, but in reality they were fucking gorgeous. :D

I'm blogging instead of doing my dissertation.

Storm

There was REALLY loud thunder here just now. 0_0

Senate House




Went to Senate House today to get a wider selection of books to read for my dissertation. What a weird place. It was basically shit. The building was massively confusing, the book selection was basically poor, almost what you'd get at any library... I managed to find one book that I quote-mined, and even that I only really did to justify having gone there. The Ge
rman Historical Institute will be better, perhaps. Gotta wait til Monday for that.

I learned the little riff in Hate To Say I Told You So by The Hives. S'just the same power chord in different places, but I feel quite good about it all the same.

Today I'm makin... Enchiladas! Fucking love enchiladas. I'm gonna put so many in my face. Actually, I thought of making a food blog a while back and photographing the stuff I made. Maybe that's a bit narcissistic though. Ah fuck it what's the harm. I'd need to brush up on my presentation skills though, that's probably the least developed part of my cooking.

Really wanna go to a raucous gypsy rock/swing gig and get hammered on s
pirits and dance around - been doing this essay for days and days. I think it would blast the cobwebs away good and proper. Maybe Jess and Molly will be up for going out on the lash when they get here. The best kinds of night are when you head out basically planless, wrecked and hyped up, and end up in a million different places and seeing loads of people you know. It makes the world feel like home. It's funny though, even when there is a plan, the plan really only ever amounts to a combination of people, a variety of intoxicant and a location. These are the only variables. =p I like that though, really. It leaves things open-ended.


Today I saw two massive murals by Southbank. One said "Life is to blame for everything" and the other was a big clenched fist with "fight the nothingness" written underneath it. I thought they were pretty cool.



Wednesday 11 April 2012

Tuesday 10 April 2012

2012


Saturday at Linton was such fun. :) Drinking in the sun there is always good. We played umbrella stretch, and then Merlin long-boarded from one end of linton to the other, plucked the stuck umbrella out of the ground, hurled it and stuck it back in again, and seamlessly long-boarded to the station. What a legend! It was nice seeing him even though h
e crush hugged me and threw me around like a toy. He's such an irrepressible maniac. =p The moon was also really good that night.


I've played guitar every day of 2012 so far, which is good. I think it might be the first new years resolution I've really stuck to, except when I was a kid and decid
ed not to drink coke for a year for no particular reason. I was a weird kid. Do people normally stick to their new years resolutions? I get the impression most of them are to do with losing weight and going to the gym... pretty dull really but I suppose if you were fat then it would be a big deal. hehe. BIG deal. God that was really atrocious even by my standards wasn't it? For some reason I take real pleasure in things that are just stupid/lame, hence my habit of deliberately cannibalising all the most ridiculous slang. The guitar is going well, I think, although it's definitely become apparent that you never reach any kind of escape velocity where it gets easier - basically every bit of progress has to be slogged away at. But that's okay, so far I've mostly had the self-discipline to just keep at it without being int
imidated by the difficulty. Hopefully I'll be able to play along with people and be competent enough to do some songs with kie and jess within the year. This is the plan. If I practice hard I can do it I think. Jacob said the other day that my projects and attempts at skill-acquisition are getting more likely to be stuck to on a long term basis, like with cooking. I hope that's true.

I'm half-way through The Scar by China Mieville, which is proving to be his usual gourmet level. It's like the pudding of literature. It's almost sickly, in that the sophistication of the prose just doesn't relent, you can't breathe for the poetry of it... like drowning in custard. He is bloody awesome though, the sheer talent of the man... *fanboy*

At the moment I'm in London on my own, writing up my dissertation. It's a massive mission, but I am quite enjoying it in a strange way. It's pleasant to be able to just about handle myself and know what I'm talking about at this level of complexity.


I've got a penpal now, although I keep forgetting to reply to her letter.

I hope I get a job this summer. I wanna get some new clothes and go out nice places. Money and being busy definitely beat boredom and poverty, although it is great to be able to get ruined for days on end. :D Jess is way better at this than I am, she applies everywhere and works efficiently and stuff. She's gonna be more successful than me, blates.

Well looking forward to Boomtown and bangface! I love raves and partie
s. I would never have predicted it for myself when I was young, but my whole life from 16 onwards attests to this fact. haha. Seriously, getting ruined with a good mixture of strangers and friends is where all the magic happens.

As soon as this dissertation is done, I get another summer with my completely insane friends! Their love buoys me up until my head knocks against the sky. I love that bit of Keats even though mostly he is a sappy shit. And it's true.