500 Words

I'm writing a novella. Or it might be a novel. It's all very "whatever happens happens". So, let me tell you what's happening - the glacial formation of sentences. GLACIAL. They're slipping out of my noggin like a spelunker stuck in a crevasse. 500 words today. 500 - now that's 200 more than Gerard Butler got playing Monopoly (I might mean Thermopylae, I'm all about the rhymes just like Ice T) so I'm not going to sniff at it because it's better than my brains dashed across the screen, but they've made my teeth ache and my back sore. I've also finally realised that my sketchy premise for how a character gets somewhere was ... well, it put the rhu in rhubarb, and for three hours today I sat and stared at my yellow legal pad and thought about how much of it I would have to ingest before I had a vision that would deliver me the solution ...

I didn't eat it. I'm fine. I did have an idea though. I'm going to take the hack out of hackneyed and use it like a bigot uses nonsense to prove their point - unashamedly. Because how she gets there doesn't really matter, it just has to not sound like total arse. That's progress and as long as I'm getting that shitty first draft down (thanks to the Prof for recommending Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird - it's already kicked my sorry grey matter into a higher gear) that's what matters.

So here's to 500 more today.

Gender: Drug of choice?

I've been reading a certain author's work for years, at least since the late nineties. I love her writing. It challenges and transports me in ways that are so very singularly hers. No one else does what she does. She has a way of trapping you in the story before you even know where you are and keeping you there until she's done with you. You're not always sure what's happening because you go on the journey along with her characters - and they're not always the most reliable of witnesses. All of her characters are well-considered and written, but she writes female characters with a deftness of touch and understanding that I have always admired immensely.

Today I learned she is transgendered. I had absolutely no idea. It has never crossed my mind that she is anything other than a woman. And that's because she isn't. She is, was, and always will be a woman. That's who she is. The fact that I had no idea shows you just how little relevance the body you're born into has on who you are. For me, she is an exemplar of women's writing and the fact of her being transgendered changes that opinion not one whit.

The Richard Littlejohn piece in the Daily Mail that singled out and bullied Lucy Meadows, a woman who had courageously stood her ground and lived her truth, shows you just how achingly archaic the mind-set of some parts of society still are. Lucy was driven to suicide because of who she was. That is more wrong than mere words can ever express. We need to be teaching younger generations acceptance not aggression in the face of difference. The conformity writers like George Orwell warned us about should be feared, not encouraged. Gender constructs are the drug of a world that should be moving forward. Gender is an anachronistic tool for keeping the unruly masses in check. It's holding us back when it simply doesn't matter any more.

It takes all sorts to make a world.

Rape. Whatever.

The Steubenville rape case passed me by and I only came across it because of the outpouring of vitriol for the girl involved and the support for the "poor" boys whose golden futures have been ruined because of them being prosecuted for rape and all. Aw, those "poor" boys, they could have played in the NFL rather than being raping scum shitwads who were made to answer for their crimes.

According to some well-meaning types, in this case it was totally the victim's fault because she was drinking. In fact, she herself should be charged with underage drinking and held to account. When I say "well-meaning" I obviously mean raging fucking dickbags with the moral compass of a shitty arsehole. I just hope nothing happens to any of them while they're having a drink because, from what they say, drinking alcohol means you relinquish all standard human rights.  How many of us are asking to be mugged on the street after a night on the sauce? Shouldn't we all get beaten up and told we're trash because, after all, we were drinking? When you see someone being kicked to death in the street and you realise they've been drinking alcohol, make sure you film it, YouTube that shit, and golf clap as the victim's death rattle shimmers in the night air. If it's your boyfriend, so what? He fucking deserved it, being so drunk and shit.


When will people get it? It doesn't matter how drunk a girl is, a man's penis doesn't get sucked up into some irresistible slutty vortex of alcoholic indulgence she has created. He puts - or rather, shoves - it there because he wants to. In that instance, he is the one with the choice. She might be drunk, but her alcoholic consumption doesn't grab him by the balls and make him do it. He does it of his own free will, unlike his victim who has her's taken from her. What about her life? What about her future? It will never be the same, she can never go back, do over. Rape stays with the victim forever, one way or another. She has already paid for his crime. She will carry on paying for it for the rest of her life.

In Which I Talk About Self-Harm *trigger warning*

I might be the only person (who wasn't a troll) to have provoked censure from a self-harm forum. For a while, when my shit got really bad, I burned myself with a certain kind of liquid. It prolonged the pain and left a "better" wound than cutting. Literally no one understood - fuck, why would they? Nevertheless, there I was, sitting at the computer, not wanting to go down that path again, wanting desperately for someone to tell me ... something, something that would make more sense. I wanted acceptance at least. All I got was virtual open mouths and quite a few WTFs?! It didn't help. Every one has their limit, it would seem.

Today is Self Injury Awareness Day. Self Injury or Harm is one of those things that people find almost impossible to understand. You hear it and think "save us from one more teen angst attention dramz" or  you might be all "That shit be crazy. Why would anyone do that?". Indeed, that last is an excellent question.

Why the fuck would anyone do it? Let me tell you why I did it.

I'm a self-harmer (you got that, right?), although I haven't self-harmed for a long time now, many years in fact. There was a time when it was the only way that I had to cope with simply being me. What was worse was that although I had been a perennial picker of scabs etc as a child and self-harmed on and off during adolescence, I developed into a major league SH'er in my twenties. I know, right? Get your fucking shit together, loser. Who does that?

A lot of people. They just don't talk about it. Because of shame.

Well, I'm not ashamed. Shame can fuck right off. It’s not a useful emotion and I want no part of it. As Augusten Burroughs says in his book This Is How,

         “Shame is the landfill emotion. It’s not organic, like joy. It was dumped there by somebody else.

         A manipulation.

         Shame is very heavy, dense disappointment; somebody else’s in you.

         Inside of disappointment is a deeper judgement: Less than. Inferior. Defective.

         …  Shame can lead to a shitload of problems.”

So fuck that shit. For various reasons, I had a tough time, mentally, for a very long time. Self-harming got me through a lot of it, as bizarre as that may sound to you. It got me through because in the cacophony of self-hatred, paranoia and confusion that I experienced for so long, it was the one thing that made me certain about what I felt. When you're lost in Dorothy's twister with no land in sight, you hang onto the one thing that makes sense. For me that was pain and the mark that followed. I knew what that was. I could deal with that. Easy peasy.

It's not about suicide, although I did try that too but not at the times I was self-harming. Self harm is very different from suicide. It might seem similarly self-destructive, but SH is about wanting to be alive, not wanting to end it all. It was a way to manage the blaring racket inside me, to control my pain, to make sense of things. I wanted to feel something, to know that I felt it and to decide when I felt it.

I would never suggest it as a form of therapy. I would a) truly hope that no one ever felt even a tenth of what I felt, b) but if they did their family and friends would see it and give them the support they need rather than ignoring or admonishing them or c) that they themselves find another way out of the spiral. 

Do not treat Self Harm as the problem. It is a symptom. Casting the shadow of shame on it because you don’t understand how someone could do that to themselves is a bullshit move. If you care about someone, be there for them. I know it's hard, but sometimes simply taking the next breath is hard. Believing you're not worth the effort of taking the next breath is hard. If you don’t understand it, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist or can be fixed with that good old maxim “sort yourself out”. That shit does not work. DOES. NOT. WORK. Self-harm happens because other shit is kicking the self-harmer’s arse and while you might not stop it, you can at least do them a solid by not ignoring them and not judging them. Because you care, right? So your squeamishness about the harm they do themselves can be contained. You never know, just not being a dick about it might be enough to make them stop. They’ll know they’re not alone, that although they might not be understood, they’re not lost in that dark vortex of self; that they have a strand of red in the labyrinth. Sometimes that’s enough. Sometimes it isn’t. But you’ll never know if you don’t quell the urge to ignore it.

Of course, they won’t want to talk about it. I never did. Patience and acceptance worked for me. Both mine and that of my lifeline. I've been enormously lucky. It wasn’t easy. It can become addictive – what shit that makes you feel better, if only for a moment, can’t? But I stopped. I don’t say I don’t ever think about it, but I don’t do it. It’s not my first port of call. I have control without it now. More than anything, however, I learned not to be ashamed. 

Shame. What a useless ballbag of an emotion. So fuck it.

A Short Treatise on the Ballery of Others

Sometimes people are balls. The trick is, I guess, to understand that this does not make you balls and that their ballery is their own concern. Also, expecting them to not be balls just because you can see that they are, in fact, balls or calling them out on the aforementioned ballery because they apparently cannot see it themselves is not necessarily going to reduce their level of being balls. Making your point is just going to wash away in their scrotal sac tide of ballery and you'll get heartburn. Which is balls. So think to yourself, I feel bad for your epic balls-ness but fuck it I'm not going to be balls about this ballery myself. I'm not going to "rise above it" or any of that shitdickery, I'm just going to worry about my own balls and maybe polish them so they're shiny and not clammy and sad like yours.

Break free from the ballery of others. Be in touch with your own balls.

Silver Linings ...

Don't get me wrong. I quite enjoyed Silver Linings Playbook. However, something about it left me cold. A lot about it. Maybe it was the utter lack of chemistry between the leads. Lawrence had more chemistry with Chris Tucker in their brief dancing bits and Cooper had more chemistry with his bed.

Don't actors learn to act with their eyes anymore? Both Cooper and Lawrence pulled the faces but I didn't feel the emotions coming from inside them. Does that make sense? Probably not, but against something of a masterclass from Robert De Niro and, particularly, Jacki Weaver as Cooper's parents it made for a somewhat hesitant watch.

It's a "dram-rom-com" that tries to suggest we're all a bit crazy, ho ho ho, but we can still love and be loved, we just have to move forward, face the truth (whatever the fuck that is) and take responsibility. It has moments of sweetness and "truth" (mainly in the medium of the uncensored - because they're crazy y'all - protagonists asking and revealing to each other crazy bald facts about their crazy lives)   but something about it fell short and flat. I certainly have to wonder about the calibre of other performances in the main acting Oscar categories if these two are being jizzed over in the press.

That said, they're not awful, far from it. They're quite engaging, and Lawrence tries really hard to be a grown up, it just comes across that she's "trying" rather than "being". I do think she's going to get better as she gets older. By the time she's Weaver's age she may well have acquired those righteous acting chops too. Cooper was better than a plank of wood (his usual M.O. which is often to do with the films he chooses - no one does Face like Dirk Benedict, bitches*) He's eloquently hyper but his swift turnaround from manic instability to calm realisation didn't work for me. That said, enlightenment can sometimes hit you like a freight train, even if you're all crazy and shit. So okay, I thought, I can swallow that ... but then his dead eyes drained my remaining sympathy like a catheter. Come on man.

I want to say good things about this film but, if I'm honest, I found it bordering on patronising wankfest (and not in the fuzzy tingle times way). I'd say something cavalier about better performances or maybe casting for the leads saving the day ... but the saccharine yackydah of the convenient ending you can see coming a mile away - while potentially satisfying for the rom-com crowd - pinches my ball sac.

5/10 - for Weaver, DeNiro and Tucker.

*That fucking A-Team film. Have people no goddamned shame?

2013 is the year I turn 40. FUCK YEAH!

I just read an article with a woman who turned 40 this year and has finally "accepted" that she is no longer young and has had to give up her youthful dreams, like going to acting school or becoming an über-tycoon. There are several questions here, not least of which are

1) Why did I waste time I will never get back reading such banality? and

2) WTF? If we all assign ourselves to the scrap heap or give up on dreams because of being a certain age then we are just conforming to the idiot dichotomy of modern life. Youth is the be all and end all and yet we have an increasingly "older" population?

Youth is precious simply because it is fleeting. So while it's nice and we should perhaps try to appreciate our time in the land of tight jeans and wild hair (not so much the tight jeans for me, I weighed about 19 stone for most of my twenties, but I did often have mad hair) shouldn't we bloody well value the fact that our shit gets wiser or, at the very least, we've failed often enough to start working that shizzle into a golem of self-advantage rather than self-sabotage at last?

I intend to be not young for a long fucking time. Maybe I'm lucky - Mr Y calls me the baby-faced assassin - and it's true, I don't particularly have wrinkles and people regularly think I'm about ten years younger than my not-at-fucking-all decrepit 39 years. But face is not fact. I am 39 and I will be 40 in about 9 and a half months. So according to that fool woman, it's time I accepted I'm not young and that I should give up childish dreams. Well, I say, fuck that shit. Fuck it right up the arse and out the ear. Realising that you're not as young as you were is like saying "hey man, this water is like totally wet" REDUNDANT. Age is meaningless. People die all the time at all kinds of ages, many of them far too young (quite a few far older than they deserved, naming no names). Rather than bemoaning our loss of years, we should be shouting "FUCK YEAH! I'm still here and I'm kicking that time shit in the BALLS!". The last things you are going to prise out of my cold dead hands are my dreams, youthful or otherwise. That's right. I'm going to rule the world, I'm going to write a best-selling library of books and  Benedict Cumberbatch is going to rub his balls all over his Oscar for starring in my movies. Or something. I'm going to outdo Bassey, I'm going to win gold medals. I'm going to do it all. Or I won't, whatever. But I'm always going to dream I can.

Onwards.